Fauci: ‘I Didn’t Recommend Locking Anything Down’ – Fauci 2020: ‘I Recommended to the President We Shut Down the Country’

“I didn’t recommend locking anything down,” White House Science Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday – but, in October of 2020 he boasted he recommended to former President Donald Trump “that we shut the country down.”

Discussing the “disastrous levels of learning loss” and “mental health crisis” associated with the COVID school closures in an interview with The Hill, Fauci was asked if he’d “do it all over again.” Fauci answering by denying that he “didn’t recommend locking anything down”:

The Hill: “I wonder if you would recommend locking down schools if you had to do it all over again.”

Dr. Fauci: “I didn’t recommend locking anything down.”

FAUCI YESTERDAY: “I didn’t recommend locking anything down.”

FAUCI IN OCTOBER 2020: “I recommended to the president that we shut the country down.” pic.twitter.com/lvw59IBndA

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 26, 2022

But, when Fauci was trying to shift responsibility for not shutting the country down sooner to former President Donald Trump in 2020, Fauci said the opposite. As Yahoo! News reported on October 6, 2020, Fauci said he recommended the shutdown, but Trump didn’t take his advice:

“When it became clear that we had community spread in the country, with a few cases of community spread—this was way before there was a major explosion like we saw in the Northeastern corridor driven by New York City metropolitan area—I recommended to the president that we shut the country down.”

…

“Unfortunately, since we actually did not shut down completely the way China did, the way Korea did, the way Taiwan did, we actually did see spread even though we shut down.”

Three months earlier, in July of 2020, Dr. Fauci recommended that states should consider a second shutdown, CNBC reported at the time:

“Any state that is having a serious problem, that state should seriously look at shutting down. It’s not for me to say because each state is different.”