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President Donald Trump hurled expletives at stock prices for not rising fast enough when the first COVID-19 vaccine trials were successful, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Fauci, one of the nation’s leading infectious disease experts who led the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic through 2022, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey as a Public Servant Coming next week is his chapter on working with Trump during the pandemic, aptly titled “He Loves Me, He Doesn’t Love Me.” The New York Times‘Review of this book.
Fauci wrote that the former president hurled verbal abuse at him when the stock market failed to respond adequately to the COVID-19 vaccine, saying, “The president was furious and said this can’t continue.”
“He said he loves me, but the country is in trouble and I’m making it worse,” he continued. “He added that I’ve cost the country ‘a trillion dollars’ because stocks only rose 600 points on positive Phase 1 vaccine news when they should have risen 1,000 points.”
Fauci noted that Trump added an expletive to his rant.
“I’m a pretty sensitive person, but being yelled at by the president of the United States, no matter how much he says he loves you, is no fun,” Fauci wrote in the New York Times.
The doctor also criticized Mike Pence for supporting Trump during the pandemic. Times.
“The Vice President is, for the most part, loyal to the President in public,” Fauci wrote. “That is part of the job. But in my opinion, VP Pence has sometimes gone too far. During task force meetings, he would often say things like, ‘There are a lot of smart people here, but we all know the smartest ones are at the top.'”
According to The New York Times, Fauci also noted other odd details about the former president, including that Trump once said he had never gotten a flu shot.
“When I asked [Trump] “When asked why, he replied, ‘I’ve never had the flu, so why do I need a flu shot?’ I had no answer,” Fauci wrote.
Dr. Fauci recently drew national attention again when he testified before a Republican-led congressional committee about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the public portion of the hearing, right-wing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene inexplicably accused the top infectious disease expert of practicing “bad science” and called for Dr. Fauci’s license to be revoked.
