Tony's Diary Package — page 760

lays from Washington Post: The Health 202: Five takeaways from Fauci's email exchanges By Paige Winfield Cunningham Reporter June 2, 2021 at 8:30 a.m. EDT with Alexandra Ellerbeck Early in the coronavirus pandemic, Anthony S. Fauci expressed skepticism that deaths in the United States would top 500,000. He called the public's fascination with him "surrealistic." And he assured China's top public health official that "We will get through this together." Hundreds of pages of emails obtained by The Post and BuzzFeed News through Freedom of Information Act requests confirm the way Fauci is already viewed by many -- as diplomatic, tactful and responsive to inquiries from the public, a quality which often kept him up late at night answering emails. "The correspondence from March and April 2020 opens a window to Fauci's world during some of the most frantic days of the crisis, when the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was struggling to bring coherence to the Trump administration's chaotic response to the virus and President Donald Trump was seeking to minimize its severity," The Post's Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb write. "Fauci's actions during that period and beyond remain an intense focus for many Americans and political leaders," they add. "During daily televised briefings at the White House, Fauci emerged as an at times reluctant -- and polarizing -- media star: To Trump supporters, he was a contrarian who seemed to undermine the president at every turn, while others viewed him as a reassuring voice of reason." "The emails show that he was inundated with correspondence from colleagues, hospital administrators, foreign governments and random strangers -- about 1,000 messages a day, he says at one point -- writing to seek his advice, solicit his help or simply offer encouragement."