Sophia Michaels
The nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said hundreds of thousands of Americans will likely die of coronavirus.
The doctor made the ominous prediction during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.
After host Jake Tapper asked how many COVID-19 cases the U.S. will see, Fauci spoke of models and the reliability of worse and best-case scenarios they provide.
Fauci predicted that the country will see between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths, adding, “We’re going to have millions of cases.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci says there could potentially be between 100,000 to 200,000 deaths related to the coronavirus and millions of cases. “I just don’t think that we really need to make a projection when it’s such a moving target, that you could so easily be wrong,” he adds. #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/F2MOHY3xl4
— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) March 29, 2020
Fauci also said that because the pandemic is “such a moving target” that projections “could easily be wrong.” The U.S. now has the most COVID-19 cases so far and, as of Saturday, the number of reported deaths had doubled to 2,000.
At the same time Fauci is facing a raging coronavirus pandemic, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has also been hit with another viral entity — online conspiracy theories aimed at discrediting him in the name of defending President Trump.
According to the New York Times, a smear campaign by Trump’s most ardent supporters began because of what some perceived as a slight by Fauci directed at the president during a coronavirus White House briefing on March 20.
A video and image of Fauci tilting his head down and touching his forehead while standing behind Trump went viral when some took Fauci’s body language as a sign of exasperation because the president had just referred to the State Department as the “Deep State Department.”
After that March 20 briefing, the hashtags #FauciFraud grew in popularity. Conservative groups began publishing anti-Fauci posts, which were then promoted on public social media platforms, private Facebook groups, YouTube videos and far-right online talk shows.
Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington who has studied misinformation told the Times, “There seems to be a concerted effort on the part of Trump supporters to spread misinformation about the virus aggressively.”
Luckily for Americans, somehow, Fauci seems to be taking the smear campaign, the pandemic, and a fact-adverse president in stride.
Featured via: Rollingstone
