Agree. The press wants him to say things that are not his domain and when he doesn't say what they want, they just present a portion of what he said. He's almost too professional for the role he's in, I guess. I get presenting the facts, but when you're addressing a nation in fear, there's nothing wrong with presenting the best and worse case scenario. Not just the worst.
I think that by not being a politician, he's not expecting people to twist everything he says. At least not at the beginning, by now he's probably very aware of how this goes. He's probably genuinely surprised and annoyed by how inaccurate his words are portrayed at times.
For example, look at this quote from March. This is from an NPR article that actually contained all the necessary details, because NPR is a high quality source. But I'm sure you remember bits and pieces of this being reported by lots of other sources, leaving out pretty damn valuable information.
He says:
- They are using modeling for a prediction, and that the "middle of the road" prediction is 100-200,000 (Astonishingly, the model was dead ass accurate there, because it certainly looks like we're going to end up right in that range)
- To calm people's nerves who are seeing the modeling, he makes sure to say that the high-ends of the modeling (those in the millions) are "almost certainly off the charts", and highly unlikely.
- He goes even further to say that we should
not even put that much emphasis on these estimates because they could easily turn out inaccurate and mislead people. To me, that's a very honest and humble message to send. Admitting that no expert can actually predict these things with an absolute degree of certainty is something that is very important for people to know.
Here's a short portion of it from NPR:
Dr. Anthony Fauci said based on modeling of the current pace of the coronavirus' spread in the U.S., "between 100,000 and 200,000" people may die from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
Fauci said the 100,000-to-200,000 death figure is a middle-of-the-road estimate, much lower than worse-case-scenario predictions.
He said preparing for 1 million to 2 million Americans to die from the coronavirus is "almost certainly off the chart," adding: "Now it's not impossible, but very, very unlikely."
However, Fauci cautioned people not to put too much emphasis on predictions, noting that "it's such a moving target that you could so easily be wrong and mislead people."
What we do know, he says, is that "we've got a serious problem in New York, we've got a serious problem in New Orleans and we're going to have serious problems in other areas."
https://www.npr.org/sections/corona...-000-americans-could-die-from-the-coronavirus
But after those quotes, the media ran a bunch of headlines about the potential death toll, and very few of them included his quotes about how
unlikely the highest estimates are, how difficult these things are to predict, how inaccurate it could turn out to be, and that our focus should not be on these estimates.
A good portion of the media has done a truly shit job of relaying his messages with any fidelity. Honestly, it seemed like a lot of the media heard him say that, and literally did the exact opposite by focusing very heavily on the estimates that he said should not be the emphasis.