BUSINESS INSIDER – 05/04/2020: Donald Trump is under a lot of pressure regarding his response to coronavirus pandemic. The one thing he’s resented the most is that he downplayed the virus when it first appeared. Now, POTUS claims that he wasn’t the only one doing this, as he said that even Dr. Anthony Fauci wasn’t taking COVID-19 seriously.
Speaking to reporters at a Fox News town hall, President Trump said: “What I did, way early, is I closed our country to China.” Trump was talking about what he did when the virus first appeared. The doubts that he was indeed downplaying the virus are still strong, despite this move.
POTUS installed China travel ban only after the World Health Organization declared that coronavirus is a global health emergency. Continuing defending his COVID-19 response President Trump added: “Nancy Pelosi was a month later saying it was going to pass — everybody, even Tony Fauci, was saying it’s going to pass, not going to be a big deal.”
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Regardless of what Mr. Trump claims, there is evidence that the US intelligence warned Trump’s administration of possible coronavirus pandemic even as far as in January. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was warning Trump’s administration of a possible outbreak back in 2017.
During a speech at a Georgetown University, Fauci said: “There is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the arena of infectious diseases. The thing we’re extraordinarily confident about is that we’re going to see this in the next few years.”
Intelligence has just reported to me that I was correct, and that they did NOT bring up the CoronaVirus subject matter until late into January, just prior to my banning China from the U.S. Also, they only spoke of the Virus in a very non-threatening, or matter of fact, manner…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 3, 2024
While this was in 2017, Donald Trump was referring to what Fauci said in January during an interview with Newsmax, before the pandemic: “But this is not a major threat to the people of the United States, and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.”
Source: businessinsider.com
Nina Smith 