Former Vice President Joe Biden said in an interview Tuesday that his top concern during the coronavirus crisis is the dissemination of misinformation about the virus.
“The number one thing I’m most concerned about, Whoopi, is misinformation,” Biden, who has been streaming his own campaign coronavirus briefings, told host Whoopi Goldberg on ABC’s “The View.”
“Listen to the scientists. Listen to the doctors. Listen to what they have to say,” he continued. “I would respectfully suggest that you should have Dr. [Anthony] Fauci on a lot more than the president or anyone who’s not an expert like Fauci, laying out exactly what’s going on.”
Fauci, who is a leader on the White House coronavirus task force, has become one of the more popular faces of the president’s team during the daily briefings.
Trump received some backlash last week after he touted an anti-malaria drug as a coronavirus cure, despite health officials’ warnings that not enough is known about its effects to draw a conclusion.
Fauci clarified Trump’s comments about the drug last week.
“Many of the things out there are what I have called ‘anecdotal reports,'” Fauci said. “The information that you’re referring to specifically is anecdotal. It was not done in a controlled clinical trial, so you really can’t make any definitive statement about it.”
However, Fauci said in an interview released on Tuesday that he did not want to be pitted against Trump in the news media.
“That is really unfortunate — I would wish that would stop because we have a much bigger problem here than trying to point out differences,” Fauci said on the “Mornings on The Mall” podcast. “There really fundamentally at the core … are not differences.”