President Donald Trump expressed his disapproval of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Senate testimony, saying that the expert’s grim warnings against reopening the country too early were “unacceptable.”
“I was surprised by his answer,” Trump told reporters according to The New York Times. “To me it’s not an acceptable answer, especially when it comes to schools.”
Fauci, the nation’s top expert on infectious disease, had signaled his intentions to be blunt about the “needless suffering and death” that reopening too soon would cause in his estimate.
During the Senate hearing on Tuesday, Fauci remained true to his stance and also emphasized the still unknown effects that the novel coronavirus could have on children if they were to be returned to school.
“I think we better be careful, if we are not cavalier, in thinking that children are completely immune to the deleterious effects,” Fauci said in his testimony. “You’re right in the numbers that children, in general, do much, much better than adults and the elderly and particularly those with underlying conditions. But I am very careful, and hopefully humble in knowing that I don’t know everything about this disease. And that’s why I’m very reserved in making broad predictions.”
“He wants to play all sides of the equation,” Trump claimed, before saying that the economy next year would be “phenomenal,” the Times notes.
This is not the first time that Fauci has gotten under the President’s skin. In the middle of last April, Trump raised eyebrows when he retweeted a post with the hashtag “#FireFauci”, adding more fuel to the much-speculated upon Trump-Fauci divide, spurred on by the fact that Fauci has shown no issue with contradicting the President‘s overenthusiastic, sometimes dangerous claims and predictions as it relates to the virus.