One of the accusations progressives love to fling at conservatives is that conserves “don’t believe in science.”
A subgenre of this insidious charge was the media’s attempt to drive a wedge between President Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The media portrayed the President as dangerously rejecting Fauci’s scientific advice in order to get the country back to work prematurely.
In a story headlined “Trump’s Unheralded Reason,” the Washington Free Beacon debunks the notion that Trump refuses to listen to the scientists:
Though derided for his disinclination to follow the advice of experts, Trump has relied on the medical experts advising him on the crisis to defer the easing of current social distancing restrictions he had argued for just days before. Having expressed the hope that he could ease the restrictions by Easter, the president reluctantly came to the conclusion that prudence dictated an extension of the current regime devastating the economy—an unprecedented economic contraction that is entirely self-inflicted, but necessary. We will cut off a limb to save the rest of the body.
Addressing Trump’s decision to extend the current guidelines, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN that he and coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx “made it very clear to him that if we pull back on what we were doing and didn’t extend [the social distancing guidelines], there would be more avoidable suffering and avoidable death. So it was a pretty clear decision on his part.”
Fauci put it this way: “We showed him the data, he looked at the data, and he got it right away,” Fauci said. “Dr. Debbie Birx and I went in together and leaned over the desk and said, ‘Here is the data, take a look.’ He looked at them, he understood them, and he just shook his head and said, ‘I guess we got to do it.'”
If you watch the President’s daily briefings, you have long ago concluded that most of the press (there are exceptions) use the valuable time to try to trip up the President rather than getting good scientific information for the public.