As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, Dr. Anthony Fauci quickly became the most prominent member of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force.
But unfortunately for Fauci, while he has been widely hailed by many media figures, the acclaim isn’t universal. Speaking Wednesday on Fox News‘ The Five, Jesse Watters said it’s hard to see Fauci as an expert, given his often-changing stances on the pandemic and its future in the U.S.
“Is this guy running for office? Because he’s flip-flopped more than a politician,” Watters said Wednesday, according to Fox. “This guy is supposed to be the expert. You would think experts could say ‘I don’t know.’ But they don’t, because they’re experts and they think they know everything.”
“We don’t believe anything”
According to Fox, Watters went on to connect Fauci to other scientists whose predictions haven’t always measured up.
“Haven’t experts been taking it on the chin recently?” he asked on The Five. “These are the same experts that tell us global warming is going to kill us in 10 years… These guys don’t know anything.”
The Fox host said when “you’ve gone back and forth so many times, we don’t believe anything you say.”
“I’m feeling better about it”
Fox also reported that Fauci, who serves as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recently raised eyebrows when he told CNN that the dreaded second coronavirus wave may not come in the fall as had been previously predicted.
“We often talk about the possibility of a second wave, or of an outbreak when you’re reopening. We don’t have to accept that as an inevitability,” Fauci said Wednesday, according to Fox.
“Particularly when people start thinking about the fall, I want people to really appreciate that it could happen but it is not inevitable,” Fauci added, according to Business Insider. “I’m feeling better about it as we go by with the weeks that go by, and we see that we’re getting more and more capability of testing.”
He went on: “If we do the kinds of things that we’re putting in place now, to have the workforce, the system, and the will to do the kinds of things that are the clear and effective identification, isolation and contact tracing, we can prevent this second wave that we’re talking about, if we do it correctly.”
Is it inevitable?
Those words seem to mark a major reversal from public projections that Fauci was making last month. During an interview with NBC News, the health official said: “It’s inevitable that the coronavirus will return next season… When it does, how we handle it, will determine our fate.”
He also said there “could be a rebound to get us right back in the same boat we were in a few weeks ago,” as CNBC reported. “It’s inevitable that we will have a return of the virus,” Fauci added, “or maybe it never even went away.”
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