Trump calls Fauci 'disaster' as COVID-19 cases soar ahead of election

With just two weeks remaining for his re-election campaign and with yet another peak in the coronavirus cases in the US, President Donald Trump has once again attacked top health expert Anthony Fauci, calling him a “disaster."

During a campaign call in Las Vegas on Monday, Trump said that Americans “are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” referring to the doctor and other health officials.

“People are saying: ‘Whatever. Just leave us alone’,” Trump added.

“Fauci is a disaster. If I listened to him, we’d have 500,000 deaths,” the president said during the call, which the campaign allowed reporters to join.

The country still leads the world in coronavirus cases, though.

As of Monday, US health officials reported 8,212,981 confirmed cases and 220,119 virus deaths across the nation, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Trump has on many occasions disagreed with Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, over COVID-19 restrictions, including social-distancing and mask-wearing guidelines.

“Fauci is a nice guy. He’s been here for 500 years,” Trump said.

The doctor has been in the position since 1984 and is a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

At almost the same time Trump was attacking him, Fauci was being awarded the National Academy of Medicine's first-ever Presidential Citation for Exemplary Leadership during a virtual ceremony.

He warned during the event that there are "a lot of challenges ahead of us and I can't help thinking that we're really going through a time that's disturbingly anti-science in certain segments of our society." 

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Trump, however, repeated his common claim about having the pandemic under control on Monday, saying that the US was “rounding the turn” of the outbreak.

More than 70,450 new coronavirus cases were reported in the US on Friday, the highest figure since July 24, according to a New York Times database.

More than 900 new deaths were also recorded.

Over the past week, there has been an average of 56,615 virus cases per day, an increase of 30 percent from the average two weeks earlier.

Connecticut and Florida lead the country, with increases of 50% or more.

Trump’s own party members questioned his remarks about Fauci.

Republican Senator Lamar Alexander said Fauci is “one of our country’s most distinguished public servants.”

“If more Americans paid attention to his advice, we’d have fewer cases of COVID-19, and it would be safer to go back to school and back to work and out to eat,” Alexander said.

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Shortly before Trump held a rally in Nevada, the doctor said, “I was worried that he was going to get sick when I saw him in a completely precarious situation of crowded, no separation between people, and almost nobody wearing a mask.”

The US president was admitted to the Walter Reed Medical Center earlier this month after being diagnosed with COVID-19. But he rushed to the White House after less than three nights, prompting criticism among both Democrats and Republicans for “politicizing” his illness.

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