Trump wages war on CDC over ‘tough’ school reopening policy after lashing out at Dr Fauci
PRESIDENT Donald Trump has waged war against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's "impractical" school reopening policies a day after slamming Dr Anthony Fauci.
Trump railed against the guidelines released last week by the CDC and revealed on Wednesday morning that he plans to meet with the federal agency about their "expensive guidelines".
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"I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough and expensive guidelines for opening schools," he tweeted.
"While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!"
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio revealed on Wednesday that schools in the city won't fully reopen until September, CNN reported.
"Most schools will not be able to have all their kids in school at the same time," he said.
Under his proposal, students will be in school a maximum of three times a week.
The president shrugged off Dr Anthony Fauci's warning that the US battle with coronavirus has just begun, saying the country is "in a good place" to beat the disease.
Trump was optimistic about his administration's handling of the pandemic when asked Tuesday night about how to "reconcile" Fauci's caution with "encouraging news" like the possibility of a vaccine.
"Well, I think we're in a good place," he said in an interview with journalist Greta Van Susteren on Full Court Press.
"I disagree with him. Dr Fauci said don't wear masks, and now he says wear them."
The president pointed out "numerous things" said by the nation's top disease expert, including not to ban travel from China, which Trump announced on January 31.
"I didn't listen to my experts, and I banned China," he said.
"We could have been in much worse shape."
"So we've done a good job," he added.
"In two, three, four weeks, by the next time we speak, I think we're going to be in very good shape."
Trump did acknowledge the rise in cases in California and Florida, but said "many other states are in very fine shape."
The president's comments directly contradict remarks made on Monday by Fauci, who cautioned that the US is still "knee-deep" in the first wave of the coronavirus outbreak.
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"We are still knee-deep in the first wave of this," he said during an online discussion hosted by the National Institutes of Health.
States reopening too quickly has led to "record-breaking" cases, Fauci said.
He also noted that unlike several countries in the European Union, the US never decreased its number of new cases to a "baseline."
"If you look at the graphs from Europe, the European Union as an entity, it went up and then came down to the baseline," he said.
"Now they're having little blips, as you might expect, as they try to reopen. We went up, never came down to baseline, and now we're surging back up."
The US set a new one-day record of cases last Thursday with more than 55,000 new infections reported nationwide.
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In his testimony to Congress last week, Fauci warned that the federal government needs to get a grip on the pandemic fast - otherwise, cases could reach up to a whopping 100,000 per day.
Several states have recently had to push back their reopening plans and rework their COVID-19 precautions as cases in the country continue to skyrocket.
The US is still the hardest-hit nation when it comes to the coronavirus: more than three million Americans have been infected with the disease that's killed at least 133,000 people.
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