DONALD Trump released a scathing statement slamming Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Deborah Birx on Tuesday.
The former president called Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, the “king of flip-flops, and slammed Birx, who served as his coronavirus response coordinator, as a “liar.”
Trump’s comments come after both doctors spoke about missteps the Trump administration made while handling the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Based on their interviews, I felt it was time to speak up about Dr Fauci and Dr Birx, two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover up their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned,” the statement begins.
He continued to slam the health professionals for supporting plans that he claimed would have left the American economy closed and the country “years away from an approved vaccine — putting millions of lives at risk.”
Trump released the statement through conservative political commentator Byron York.
In his statement, Trump also took credit for the development of the Covid vaccines — three of which have been given emergency FDA approval and are being administered at a rapid pace across the US.
“We developed American vaccines by an American President in record time, nine months, which is saving the entire world,” he went on.
“We bought billions of dollars of these vaccines on a calculated bet that they would work, perhaps the most important bet in the history of the world.
“Dr Fauci and Dr Birx moved far too slowly, and if it were up to them we’d currently be locked in our basements as our country suffered through a financial depression.”
The long-winded takedown statement came a day after Dr Birx appeared on CNN to discuss the Covid-19 death toll in the US, which now sits at 549,000.
“I look at it this way,” Birx said. “The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from the original surge.
“All the rest of them,” she continued, referring to the subsequent Covid waves throughout the past year, “in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially” if the administration acted more aggressively.
