From Michael Spector in The New Yorker, How Anthony Fauci became America’s Doctor, three weeks ago today:
“Just before midnight on March 22nd, the President of the United States prepared to tweet. Millions of Americans, in the hope of safeguarding their health and fighting the rapidly escalating spread of covid-19, had already begun to follow the sober recommendation of Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious disease. Fauci had warned Americans to “hunker down significantly more than we as a country are doing.”
Donald Trump disagreed. “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself,” he tweeted.”
Today, May 11, 2020, let me post an update. This evening Dr. Fauci revealed in a New York Times story that he intends to warn that opening up the country now would cost lives and court disaster.
“The major message that I wish to convey to the Senate HLP committee tomorrow is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely,” he wrote. “If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to: ‘Open America Again,’ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.”
Dr. Fauci was referring to a three-phase White House plan, Opening Up America Again, that lays out guidelines for state officials considering reopening their economies. Among its recommendations: states should have a “downward trajectory of positive tests” or a “downward trajectory of documented cases” of coronavirus over two weeks, while conducting robust contact tracing and “sentinel surveillance” testing of asymptomatic people in vulnerable populations, such as nursing homes.
But many states are reopening without meeting those guidelines, seeking to ease the pain as millions of working people and small-business owners are facing economic ruin while sheltering at home.” (said the Times story)
Of course Fauci has called bullshit on Trump statements (such as calling testing “a failure”) before. One wonders if there’s a reason this statement was published the night before his testimony with three other experts before the Senate Health Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
And from the President of the United States, we have this extraordinary inability to answer any question asked by a woman in the White House press corps.
How any American women can support this man? I cannot imagine. Ignore the commentary below if you like and focus on the well-staged president vs press confrontation. This clip is classic late capitalism:
Kit Stolz 
Let me add a link to a transcript of the exchange between him and Weijia Jiang of CBS. It’s extraordinarily stupid on the President’s part.https://www.mediaite.com/tv/trump-storms-out-of-briefing-after-bizarre-exchange-about-china-with-cbss-weijia-jiang-skirmish-with-cnns-kaitlan-collins/
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