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 "The deaths are real deaths," Anthony Fauci, the director of the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on ABC
News’ This Week, adding that jam-packed hospitals and stressed-out
healthcare workers are "not fake. That’s real.”
Fauci and U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who appeared on CNN’s
State of the Union, defended the accuracy of coronavirus data
published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
after Trump attacked the agency’s tabulation methods.
“The number of cases and deaths of the China Virus is far
exaggerated in the United States because of the @CDCgov’s ridiculous
method of determination compared to other countries, many of whom
report, purposely, very inaccurately and low,” Trump wrote on
Twitter.
Trump, a Republican who leaves office on Jan. 20 after losing a bid
for a second term to Democrat Joe Biden, has frequently has
downplayed the severity of the pandemic. He has also scorned and
ignored federal recommendations for containing the spread.
More than 20 million people have been infected in the United States
and nearly 347,000 have died – or one out of every 950 U.S.
residents - since the virus first emerged in China in late 2019,
according to the CDC.
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“From a public health perspective, I have no reason to doubt those
numbers and I think people need to be very aware that it’s not just
about the deaths,” Adams said. “It’s about the hospitalizations, the
capacity.”
Fauci and Adams expressed optimism that the pace of vaccinating
Americans against the virus is accelerating after a slow start. More
than 4.2 million people have been inoculated since Dec. 14 with one
of two vaccines, far short of the Trump administration’s goal of 20
million by the end of 2020.
“We wanted to get to 20 million, but some glimmer of hope is that in
the last 72 hours, they’ve gotten 1.2 million doses into peoples’
arms, which is an average of about 500,000 a day,” Fauci said. “We
are not where we want to be. There’s no doubt about that. But I
think we can get there.”
He said he believed that the number of daily vaccinations could be
expanded to 1 million and called for "a real partnership" between
the federal and state governments.
(Additional reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Scott Malone and
Aurora Ellis)
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