It’s a new day for Dr. Anthony Fauci, who said he feels he can speak freely about the coronavirus pandemic now that Joe Biden is in the White House.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaking Thursday during his first news briefing since Biden was sworn in, said he was buoyed by the new administration’s commitment to transparency, honesty and, most importantly, science.
“It was very clear that there were things said, be it regarding things like hydroxychloroquine and other things like that, that really was uncomfortable because they were not based in scientific fact,” Fauci said of the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic, NBC News reported.
“The idea that you can get up and talk about what you know, what the evidence is, what the science is, it is somewhat of a liberating feeling,” he said.
Fauci, a member of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force and one of the prominent faces of the government’s coronavirus response efforts at the pandemic’s outset, often accompanied Trump during press briefings but soon found himself on the outs with the president, who attempted to downplay the risk of the virus even as the number of cases and deaths kept rising.
“One of the new things about this administration is that if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess. Just say you don’t know the answer,” Fauci told reporters, NBC reported.