On Sunday White House Coronavirus Task Force Member and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper.  During the interview the network discussed the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, expectations going forward and communications between the task force and President Trump.

Tapper, as have many within the mainstream media, attempted to ask leading questions in order to get task force members, Fauci in this case, to demonstrate that President Trump has not listened to his people and is out of control.  This despite the president’s national approval ratings for handling the pandemic being sky high.

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At one point Tapper asked, “The New York Times reported yesterday that you and other top officials wanted to recommend social and physical distancing guidelines to President Trump as far back as the third week of February, but the administration didn’t announce such guidelines to the American public until March 16th, almost a month later. Why?”

Fauci responded in a diplomatic fashion saying, “as I’ve said many times, we look at it from a pure health standpoint. We make a recommendation. Often the recommendation is taken. Sometimes it’s not. But it is what it is. we are where we are right now.”

Tapper pressed harder asking, “Do you think lives could have been saved if social distancing, physical distancing, stay-at-home measures, had started the third week of February instead of mid-March?”

While not backing off of his suggestion for an earlier start, the doctor responded with these fair remarks. “You know, Jake, again, it’s the what would have, what could have. It’s very difficult to go back and say that. I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives. Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you’re right, I mean, obviously, if we had right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.”

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Beyond knowing the mainstream media’s intentions and overt attempts to slander the president, it’s clear Tapper’s questions are asked with the goal of driving a wedge between Fauci and the president, while painting Trump as irresponsible to their viewers.

But people playing Monday morning quarterback won’t help the situation.  As most individuals with common sense can observe, this is not only uncharted territory, but is an ever fluid situation. Of course starting earlier would have helped.  Of course knowing more about the disease early on would have helped (thanks for nothing China), but we have to look at the collective response and remember where we were as a country when this started with the economy as strong as it’s ever been, unemployment low and so many other positive factors.

We also have to understand that, though a troubling virus, several new models show that over 98 percent of people recover from this disease and some reports indicate that upward of 50 percent of the populous could have already contracted COVID-19 and recovered unknowingly.

Spreading fear doesn’t help.  Attacking our president doesn’t either.

More than anything now, I fear we will get past this pandemic and have all learned nothing from it.

You can see the video below.