The Trump administration’s lack of candor and habitual breaks with scientific guidance in its pandemic response “very likely did” cost lives, Anthony Fauci said Friday morning.
“When you start talking about things that make no sense medically and no sense scientifically, that clearly is not helpful,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN Friday.
“There’s no secret, we’ve had a lot of divisiveness, we’ve had facts that were very, very clear, that were questioned,” Fauci said. “People were not trusting what health officials were saying. There was great divisiveness, masking became a political issue.”
Former President Donald Trump faced significant criticism over the final year of his presidency for his pandemic response, which strayed often from the guidance of his own administration’s health officials and veered often into bizarre territory.
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