Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday threw cold water on President Donald Trump and his allies’ attempt to distort the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) data to misleadingly shrink the COVID-19 death toll.
During an interview on “Good Morning America,” Fauci clarified the CDC’s recent report that states 6 percent (approximately 9,000) of the 183,500 COVID-19 deaths were attributed to the coronavirus alone.
The infectious disease expert pointed out that the figure simply means COVID-19 caused those 9,000 deaths without causing the pneumonia, cardiac arrest, or other complications that killed the other 94 percent of people who contracted the virus.
That data “does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of COVID didn’t die of COVID-19. They did,” Fauci said.
“So the numbers you’ve been hearing, the 180,000+ deaths, are real deaths from COVID-19. Let there not be any confusion about that,” he added. “It’s not 9,000 deaths from COVID-19. It’s 180+ thousand deaths.”
Fauci’s explanation comes after Trump retweeted several times the false claim that only 6 percent of the CDC’s recorded deaths were caused by COVID-19 (Twitter took down one of the posts Trump had retweeted for violating the platform’s misinformation policy). White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended the President’s retweets, claiming that he was “highlighting new CDC information that came out that was worth noting.”
Watch Fauci below:
FULL INTERVIEW: Dr. Fauci weighs in on 6M US coronavirus cases, deaths and comorbidity.@arobach https://t.co/Jmk8Ni1mQV pic.twitter.com/ELvo50X68N
— Good Morning America (@GMA) September 1, 2020
