CLAIM: President Donald Trump said during the first presidential debate Tuesday night that Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “President Trump saved thousands of lives.”
VERDICT: True.
Dr. Fauci in March predicted that 100,000 too 200,000 people could die of the coronavirus at a time when only 2,000 people had died of the virus.
During a news conference that same month, Trump said that, based on Dr. Fauci’s predictions, his administration “would have done a good job” of saving lives.
“I mean, looking at what we’re seeing now, I would say between 100,000 and 200,000 … deaths,” Fauci told CNN’s State of the Union, adding, “I just don’t think that we really need to make a projection, when it’s such a moving target that you can so easily be wrong and mislead people.”
In July, Dr. Fauci admitted outright that the Trump administration’s coronavirus policy decisions saved thousands of lives during a House Select Committee Hearing on the Coronavirus Response.
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) grilled Dr. Fauci during the hearing, asking the nation’s top infectious disease doctor if he had any role in implementing the Trump administration’s policies, if he agreed with the president’s policies, and if he thought they saved lives.
“By and large would you say that you and President Trump have been in agreement on most of those decisions?” Scalise asked.
“We were in agreement on virtually all of those,” Fauci answered.
Fast forward to Tuesday night’s debate, when Trump told Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden that he could have never done the job his administration had done.
“We got the masks, we got the gowns, we made ventilators. You wouldn’t have made ventilators,” Trump told Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden. “You don’t have it in your blood. You could have never have done that job.”
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