Fauci's and Birx's public withdrawal worries health experts

Key health agencies remain relegated to the background. Some congressional requests for health officials’ testimony are being rejected. And though the task force is still intact, it has not held a press briefing for 13 days — the longest the public has gone without having Anthony Fauci or Deborah Birx at the White House podium since the briefings began in late February.

“It’s a blind spot that the federal government doesn’t see this first and foremost as a public health crisis,” said Joshua Sharfstein, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins University. “This is the public health crisis of the century, and we’re sometimes treating it as anything but.”…

“I think it is critically important that we get Fauci and Birx out front,” Schrier said, lamenting that Democrats scattered throughout the country face simple logistical difficulties in countering Trump daily musings and elevating public health recommendations. “What he is setting up is a sense in the public that it is an either/or: that it’s either you save the economy or you address the public health part — and he is prioritizing the economy.”

In reality, the public health community is sounding perhaps its loudest alarms to date that the nation is careening toward a future that includes neither a saved economy nor a healthy populace.