As a mask-less Donald Trump moves full speed ahead to reopen the U.S. economy, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House coronavirus response team’s leading expert, has seemingly been benched from TV. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director gave his last television news hit two and a half weeks ago, a CNN segment in which he shrugged off the critics “disagreeing” with his cautious approach and calling for his firing as just “part of the game.” Fauci added that he won’t let attacks stop him from relaying to the American people “information that I feel is necessary to make…prudent decisions” amid the global pandemic that has taken over 93,000 lives in the U.S. “I feel I have a moral obligation to give the kind of information that I am giving,” he said.
But since that May 4 interview, Fauci and his prudence are noticeably absent from Trump’s roster of on-air representatives. In his place, the president’s reelection campaign is calling on “extremely pro-Trump” doctors to relay the administration’s focus on kick-starting the economy, rather than prioritizing public health and following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s chary reopening timeline, according to an Associated Press report. This new media plan was reportedly hatched during a May 11 conference call that featured a top Trump campaign staffer and was organized by an arm of the Save Our Country Coalition, a collective of conservative think tanks and political committees lobbying for a swift economic reboot. After one GOP activist on the call listed 27 doctors who are in lockstep with the White House, Matt Schlapp, head of the American Conservative Union, called for dispatching the group on-air to combat the “fake-news media,” shoot down accusations about Trump “not listening to doctors,” and lend credibility to his reopening rush.
This is all a change from March and April, when Fauci was a staple of the White House’s coronavirus media response, appearing on cable and network-news programs on a near-nightly basis and giving frequent interviews to print outlets. Now, as the National Institutes of Health, the parent agency of Fauci’s NIAID, has made strides toward creating a coronavirus vaccine while working with biotech company Moderna, Fauci hasn’t publicly commented on the developments. He was absent on this weekend’s round of Sunday shows, as the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman pointed out. In contrast, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar appeared on both CBS News’ Face the Nation and CNN’s State of the Union.
Fauci has instead been sent down to the minors, as it were. On Thursday, he made a cameo on actor Julia Roberts’s Instagram livestream, a relatively less-serious outlet that he nonetheless used to stress “that physical separation is working to a certain extent. So now is not the time to tempt fate and pull back completely.” Fauci also spoke to the Washington Post this week regarding the president’s “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine initiative, despite offering no remarks while present at Trump’s vaccine press briefing of the same name last week. “People don’t understand that, because when they hear ‘Operation Warp Speed,’ they think, Oh, my God, they’re jumping over all these steps and they’re going to put us at risk,” he told the paper on Wednesday, clarifying that the plan is to go “really fast but not [compromise] safety because you haven’t cut out any of the steps you would have done had you done it the traditional way.”