Coronavirus: Arizona Congressman Calls On Fauci To ‘Move Along’

ARIZONA — An Arizona congressman called on Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert who has been advising President Donald Trump on the new coronavirus, to “move along” Monday, saying he hasn’t considered the effect of quarantines and stay-at-home orders on the economy.

U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, a 5th District Republican who heads the House Freedom Caucus, also publicly called for the resignation of Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the Trump administration’s Coronavirus Task Force.

Biggs and Colorado Congressman Ken Buck co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Examiner in which they asserted Fauci “can no longer be one the primary voices in this crisis, especially after his assertion that the economic effects and devastation from this shutdown are merely inconvenient.”

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They were referring to an earlier comment from Fauci, who said, “It’s inconvenient from a societal standpoint, from an economic standing to go through this.”

“It is interesting sometimes that a brief comment can reveal the heart and mind — and in this instance, a special degree of tone deafness,” Biggs and Buck wrote in the April 11 op-ed.

Biggs told radio station radio station KFYI-AM Monday that Facui “shouldn’t have a seat at the table.”

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“He shouldn’t be making decisions that are basically impacting this country we haven’t even considered,” Biggs said. “"I mean, he has said he has not considered economic or societal or social fallout for his remedy for the epidemic. And if that's the case, I think he gets some credit for where we stand today, but I think it's time for him to move on.”

Trump Sunday retweeted a message from an unsuccessful California congressional candidate who got less than 2 percent of the vote in an open primary against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that said, “Time to #FireFauci.”

The tweet by DeAnna Lorraine said, "Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier, he could've saved more lives.Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the US at large. Time to #Fire Fauci."

The president retweeted the statement hours after Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that more could have been done earlier to control the virus spread.

“I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives,” Fauci said on the program. “Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you’re right. Obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down.”

The White House said Monday that “Trump is not firing Dr. Fauci” and the “media chatter is ridiculous.”

Biggs and Buck wrote in the editorial that for Fauci, “is it merely a societal or economic inconvenience that about 17 million workers are unemployed because of the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, with many more to come in the weeks and months ahead? The economic calamity lies largely with the origination of policies resulting from Fauci's recommendations.”

At his coronavirus news briefing Monday, Trump said he and Fauci have always been in agreement in the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which had claimed more than 23,200 lives in the United States as of Monday. Nearly 578,000 cases of coronavirus had been reported nationwide by Monday. The United States leads all other countries in both cases and deaths.

At the news briefing, Fauci clarified his comments:

"I had an interview yesterday where I was asked a hypothetical question. And hypothetical questions sometimes can get you into some difficulty because it's what would have or could have. The nature of the hypothetical question was if in fact we had mitigated earlier, could lives have been saved? And the answer to the question, is yes.

"I mean obviously, mitigation helps. I have been up here many times telling you the mitigation works. So if mitigation works and you initiate it earlier, you will probably have saved more lives. If you initiated it later, you probably would have lost more lives. You initiate at a certain time. That was taken as a way that maybe somehow was at fault here."

Coronavirus fatality rates include “all deaths of anyone with COVID-19, or the symptoms of the virus,” Biggs and Buck wrote in the op-ed.

“These are classified as a virus-caused death regardless of other health issues that might have contributed to the death,” the op-ed said. “This method of counting is promulgated by Fauci's associate Deborah Birx. It almost sounds as if she is trying to boost the fatality rate.

“Birx also recently indicated that we should not open up the country yet because there might be a second time around for the virus. Has she considered the economic destruction she is content with wreaking on the nation? One wonders if she has thought about the emotional toll — the suicides, the increase in domestic and child abuse, drug and alcohol dependence, and a host of additional societal pathologies. Has she considered the loss of life-savings, businesses, and capital?”

Both Fauci and Birx “deserve some credit for mitigating the spread of the virus,” the op-ed concluded, but “have indicated pretty strongly that they do not consider the greater needs of the country.”

» Read the full op-ed on the Washington Examiner.