Former Donald Trump political advisor Sean Spicer took to Twitter on Sunday to share a snap of Joe Biden's top medical advisor posing with the broadcaster and his partner, real estate agent Tim Malone.
“Fauci bailed on attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner because of ‘individual assessment of my personal risk.’…..so he just went to the [crowded] pre-parties #WHCD,” Spicer called the photo. The snap was taken at the 27th Annual White House Correspondents” Weekend Garden Brunch Saturday, which TV and political figures such as CBS News presenter Gayle King, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki also attended.
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Lemon also posted a selfie featuring Fauci, Malone, and himself at the same event on Instagram.
Fauci's appearance at the indoor-outdoor pre-party puzzled many after the 81-year-old had informed ABC News, the news organization that invited him to the WHCD, that he would not attend the 2,600-people event due to his own assessment of personal risk.
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It comes as Fauci, renowned for his flip-flops on COVID-19 guidelines, said last week America was “out of the pandemic phase” before backtracking and adding his remarks were misleading and “we certainly can’t say the pandemic is over.”
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Fauci’s attendance at the Garden Brunch comes after a chaotic week that saw the famed doctor take u-turns on COVID advice and be mocked by a John Hopkins professor for skipping the WHCD due to Coronavirus concerns despite being quadruple-vaccinated.
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” Dr. Fauci has been vaccinated four times and he still says he’s not comfortable going to the white house correspondents’ dinner this Saturday night,” Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Marty Makary told Fox News host.
“That is the person that is behind all the covid policies in the United States.” Then, on Tuesday, Fauci told PBS NewsHour that America was “out of the pandemic phase.”
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“We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase,” he said.
“Namely, we don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now.”
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Fauci later claimed that his remarks had been misconstrued. He explained that the COVID threat in the U.S. was not as “acute and accelerated” as it was earlier in the pandemic, and the nation had reached a new “decelerated and controlled” phase of the pandemic over the past several months.
“That does not mean we are out of the woods,” he said Wednesday, adding that the number of COVID positive cases is starting to “creep up” again.
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