Fauci: MAGA's skeptics need to hear Trump urge COVID vaccination

Dr. Anthony Fauci listens as President Joe Biden commemorates the 50 millionth COVID-19 vaccination in the U.S. on Feb. 25. Credit: AP / Evan Vucci
Should Trump be selling vaccine?
As president, Donald Trump grew tired of Americans listening to Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Fauci bristled over his treatment by Trump. Now Fauci, working as chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, says Americans need to hear more from Trump — specifically, encouragement to get the coronavirus vaccine.
In a round of interviews on the Sunday morning news shows, Fauci lamented polling that shows Trump supporters are more likely to refuse to get vaccinated than most Americans. Politics needs to be separated from "common-sense, no-brainer" public health measures, said the government's top infectious disease expert, and it would be a "game changer" for the vaccination push if the former president were to use his "incredible influence" among Republicans.
"If he [Trump] came out and said, ‘Go and get vaccinated. It’s really important for your health, the health of your family and the health of the country,’ it seems absolutely inevitable that the vast majority of people who are his close followers would listen to him," Fauci said on "Fox News Sunday." There was no immediate response from the former president’s office on Sunday.
In his only public remarks on the COVID-19 vaccine since leaving the White House, at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 28, Trump briefly said, "Everybody go get your shot" — as an aside amid his complaints that Biden and the media aren't giving him due credit for the vaccine. He repeated that grievance in a tweet-style news release last week, claiming dubiously that without him, it would have taken five years longer to develop a vaccine. But he's offered no sustained messaging to promote the vaccination campaign, nor has he shown photos of his own inoculations, as have Biden and four former presidents.
At a White House news briefing on Friday, when asked if there had been outreach for Trump to talk to vaccine-skeptical Republicans, press secretary Jen Psaki answered with curbed enthusiasm for the idea. "We recognize, as a Democratic administration with a Democratic president, that we may not be the most effective messenger to communicate with hard-core supporters of the former president," she said.
Psaki then added that "we also know that it is not always famous people who are the most effective messengers," suggesting there are nonpartisan voices such as faith leaders who can be called on as vaccine advocates.
But Andy Slavitt, a senior White House coronavirus adviser for Biden, said on MSNBC on Sunday that Trump "ought to be talking to his supporters" about the vaccine, adding that it's a nonpartisan issue. "This is an effort, the Republicans should know, [that] began before we got here, and we are carrying it out," Slavitt said.
Fauci's July 4 forecast
Fauci also echoed Biden's cautious optimism on U.S. progress against the coronavirus pandemic.
"If by the time we get to the Fourth of July — with the rollout of the vaccines — we get the level of infection so low, I'm not going to be able to tell you exactly what the specific guidelines of the CDC are [then], but I can tell you, for sure, they will be much more liberal than they are right now about what you can do," Fauci said.
Fauci said Sunday that Americans should look to recent surges and lockdowns in Europe as a reminder to keep taking precautions. For more, see Scott Eidler's story for Newsday.
Janison: Biden Cabinet is an upgrade
So far at least, Biden's Cabinet is on track to operate without the kind of fiascoes that Trump's first-year lineup produced, writes Newsday's Dan Janison. Ideological differences aside, if conventional experience and credentials count, the appointments look like an upgrade.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has been steeped in the judicial system as a federal judge and prosecutor. Jeff Sessions, the first to lead the Justice Department in the last administration, was a key Trump campaign supporter and a longtime Alabama senator. Trump ultimately canned Sessions for following ethics guidance and for recusing himself from the Russia probe.
Antony Blinken presents a similar shift as secretary of state. For better or worse, he's steeped in the ways of the pre-Trump State Department. Rex Tillerson, Trump's first secretary of state, came from ExxonMobil; Trump fired him after bitter estrangement.
New Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan is tasked with playing a sharply different role from that of Trump's first occupant of the post, who shared the 45th president's denial of climate change. Scott Pruitt resigned as Trump's first EPA administrator amid ethics probes that in part involved coziness with the fossil fuel industry.
Trump plays a pinball
In his post-presidency, Trump has yet become the formidable political force that his camp had advertised, writes Politico.
Republicans, and even some allies, say he is disorganized, torn between playing the role of antagonist and party leader. "There is no apparatus, no structure — and part of that is due to a lack of political understanding on Trump’s behalf," said a person close to the former president.
Trump has promised a ruthless settling of scores with a party apparatus that declined to fiercely defend him during his second impeachment. But Trump has maintained close ties to GOP officials who have committed to supporting congressional incumbents who cast votes against him for incitement of the deadly Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection.
One former administration official who has been in contact with Trump described him as a "pinball," noting that his tendency to abruptly change directions or seize on a new idea after speaking with a friend or outside adviser — a habit that often frustrated aides during his time in office — has carried into his post-presidency life.
Building toward infrastructure plan
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday pledged swift work by Congress on a job and infrastructure package that will be "fiscally sound," but she said she isn’t sure whether the next major item on Biden’s agenda will attract Republican backing.
"Building roads and bridges and water supply systems and the rest has always been bipartisan … except when they oppose it with a Democratic president, as they did under President Obama, and we had to shrink the package," Pelosi said on ABC's "This Week." "But, nonetheless, hopefully, we will have bipartisanship."
Wyoming's Sen. John Barrasso, the No. 3 Senate Republican, said on the same show that he wants to see bipartisan support for an infrastructure legislation. But he said the House in the last Congress refused to embrace a $287 billion bill unanimously passed by a Senate committee and changed it to a "Green New Deal" that Republicans could not accept.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told the Long Island Association in a Zoom address Friday that an infrastructure bill could fund New York’s lagging Gateway and East Side Access transit projects. For more, see Tom Brune's story for Newsday.
Mnuchin's nest egg for COVID bill costs
Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief and stimulus package, signed into law last week, won't cause the federal deficit to balloon by anywhere near that amount, Politico reports. That's because the Treasury has a cash pile of well over $1 trillion, built last year by then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who cranked up the pace of government borrowing while anticipating a big relief bill could come.
"Early on in the COVID crisis, I made sure we always had ample funds on hand to be prepared for any needed economic response," Mnuchin said in an email to Politico. He quadrupled the size of the rainy-day fund.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on ABC's "This Week" that she is confident the inflation risk from additional borrowing is "small" and "manageable."
The American Rescue Plan Act is "the right size to address the very significant problem that we have," Yellen said. "We need to defeat the pandemic. This package really does that."
More coronavirus news
See a roundup of the latest regional pandemic developments on Long Island and beyond by Newsday's Lisa L. Colangelo and Vera Chinese. For a full list of Newsday's coronavirus stories, click here.
What else is happening:
- Pelosi said during her ABC interview that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo should "look inside his heart … to see if he can govern effectively" amid ever-growing calls to resign over allegations of sexual harassment, reports Newsday's Eidler. New York's two senators have called on Cuomo to go, including Schumer, who told MSNBC that the state needs "sure and steady leadership" to keep up the fight against COVID-19 and that Cuomo has "lost the confidence of his governing partners and of so many New Yorkers."
- Biden, asked by reporters upon his return from a Delaware weekend Sunday evening whether Cuomo should resign, responded: "I think the investigation is underway, and we should see what it brings us."
- The Biden administration is deploying FEMA to the Mexican border to help care for thousands of unaccompanied migrant teens and children who are overwhelming the capacity of facilities to care for them, the Department of Homeland Security said.
- Dropped from Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief legislation was a $2 billion competitive grant program for schools that would give the federal government a more central role in promoting racial equity by combating long-standing educational disparities, The Washington Post reports. Advocates warned that the cost burden of competing would have the opposite of the intended effect on poorer districts.
- Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said Sunday that Senate Democrats will push to make permanent two provisions of the COVID-19 relief legislation that provide emergency enhanced benefits for the poor through food assistance and child tax credits.
- An Army reservist charged with taking part in the Capitol riot was known to co-workers as a Nazi sympathizer who wore a Hitler mustache, according to federal prosecutors. Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, 30, employed as a security contractor at a Navy base in New Jersey, said he would "kill all the Jews" and made derogatory remarks about Black people, other minorities and women, the prosecutors said.
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