Anthony Fauci to tell lawmakers premature reopening could lead to ‘needless’ deaths

The immunologist will be testifying remotely through video, along with two other top officials of the president’s task force, Stephen Kahn and Robert Redfield, who are all in self-quarantine after possible exposure to the virus.

Anthony Fauci, a top US immunologist and a key figure in the Trump administration’s response to the Covid-19 epidemic, is set to warn lawmakers at a Senate hearing Tuesday that premature opening of the country could cause “needless suffering and death”.

Anthony Fauci’s “checkpoints” are conditions laid down in guidelines for reopening prepared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for undoing the lockdown in phases, with clear markers for moving from one phase to the next. (REUTERS)

“The major message that I wish to convey to the Senate HLP (health, education, labor and pensions) committee tomorrow is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely,” he wrote in an email to a report of the New York Times ahead of the hearing. “If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to ‘Open America Again’, then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.”

Fauci’s “checkpoints” are conditions laid down in guidelines for reopening prepared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for undoing the lockdown in phases, with clear markers for moving from one phase to the next. The White House has blocked its release.

Fauci’s warning to the lawmakers will come at a time when US fatalities have crossed another bleak milestone to rise to 80,684, accounting for every third death worldwide; infections rose to 1.34 million.

President Donald Trump is eager to reopen the country with an eye on his re-election prospects later in the year and has called for it repeatedly, while at the same time, leaving the final decision to state governor. He has backed protests against the lockdown and publicly criticized states that are being cautious.

A widely respected research model, which has been cited the White House coronavirus task force members often, has doubled its forecast to more than 134,000 deaths at the current speed and nature of the reopening. Trump has insisted the model does not take into account social-distancing.

But the president himself doesn’t observe these social distancing guidelines and has continued to not use a mask or a face covering during his meetings and engagements, even as he was instructed all White House staff to it, in the aftermath of two White House personnel testing positive.

“If they’re a certain distance from me or if they’re a certain distance from each other, they do,” he told reporters at a White House news briefing when asked. “In the case of me, I’m not -- I’m not close to anybody.”

The president stalked out of the briefing shortly, after heated exchanges with two female reporters. He had asked a Chinese American reporter to check with China in response to an unrelated question, which he went on to call “nasty”. He had then denied another reporter a chance to ask her questions.