‘Let there not be any confusion about that’: Fauci dismisses Trump’s attempt to distort CDC figures

Diseases expert says death toll is ‘real’, following president’s misinterpretation

An attempt by Donald Trump to distort Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data on the coronavirus death toll has been dismissed by diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.

In an interview on Tuesday, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director described the American death toll, which surpassed 180,000 last week, as “real”.

The dismissal comes after the US president shared a tweet on Sunday which claimed — without basis — that the CDC had admitted to documenting only 9,000 deaths during the pandemic.

The post, reported CNN, was made by a QAnon conspiracy theory supporter, who suggested the CDC had “quietly” updated its numbers “to admit that only six per cent” of coronavirus deaths “actually died from Covid”.

It comes after the CDC last week attributed 6 per cent (approximately 9,000) of the 183,500 COVID-19 deaths to the coronavirus alone.

As Dr. Fauci argued on Tuesday, that estimation does not mean that the other 94 per cent of US coronavirus deaths were incorrectly documented.

“If you look at the people who’ve died of Covid disease, the point that the CDC was trying to make was that a certain percentage of them had nothing else but just Covid,” the diseases expert said on Good Morning America.

“That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of Covid didn’t die of Covid-19,” he continued. “They did.”

“Let there not be any confusion about that”, Dr. Fauci added. “The numbers you’ve been hearing, the 180,000+ deaths, are real deaths from Covid-19.”

The tweet shared by president Trump, which carried the death toll misinterpretation, was later deleted from the site.