Former President Donald Trump lashed out at Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx who sat down with CNN's Sanjay Gupta for the documentary project, 'COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out,' which aired Sunday night.
'Based on their interviews, I felt it was time to speak up about Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned,' Trump said.
The ex-president slammed Fauci for taking too much credit for the vaccine, while charging Birx with 'ruining the lives of countless children,' for backing shutdowns.
He suggested that Fauci didn't respect Birx, writing that he would 'always talk negatively about her and, in fact, would ask not to be in the same room as her.'
Trump also continued to mock Fauci's opening day pitch for the Washington Nationals, saying that while Fauci 'said he was an athlete in college' he 'couldn't even throw a baseball even close to the home plate, it was a "roller,"' Trump said.
In interviews for the documentary, Birx told Gupta that most deaths beyond the initial 100,000 could have been preventable.
She spoke about how the public health messaging was a mess at the federal level, because Trump and other top officials refused to wear masks and wanted to rush reopenings before getting the case numbers down.
Birx also recalled being called by Trump in August where he chewed her out.
She described it as a 'very uncomfortable conversation,' an anecdote Trump disputed.
Trump called Birx a 'proven liar' who has 'very little credibility left.'
'The states that followed her lead, like California, had worse outcomes on COVID, and ruined the lives of countless children because they couldn't go to school, ruined many businesses and an untold number of Americans who were killed by the lockdowns themselves,' Trump wrote.
The ex-president also blasted her for being a hypocrite and not following her own essential travel rules by spending time with her family over Thanksgiving in Delaware.
'Who can forget when Dr. Birx gave a huge mandate to the people of our Nation not to travel, and then traveled a great distance to see her family for Thanksgiving - only to have them call the police and turn her in?' Trump wrote. 'She then, embarrassingly for her, resigned.'
During his interviews with Gupta, Fauci didn't specifically credit Trump for getting the vaccine initiative going and instead called it the 'best decision that I've ever made.'
Talking about the explosion of cases in New York City, Fauci said, 'And that's when it became very clear that the decision we made on January the 10th – to go all out and develop a vaccine – may have been the best decision that I’ve ever made with regard to an intervention as director of the institute.'
Trump responded by saying that Fauci told him it would take three to five years to get a COVID-19 vaccine approved.
'Dr. Fauci was incapable of pressing the FDA to move it through faster. I was the one to get it done, and even the fake news media knows and reports this,' the ex-president wrote.
Trump excused himself from any blame by saying that he didn't listen to Birx or Fauci's advice when it was bad.
'Time has proven me correct,' Trump said. 'I only kept Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx on because they worked for the U.S. government for so long - they are like a bad habit!'
Left untouched were former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head, Dr. Robert Redfield and former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, Dr. Stephen Hahn, who also spoke to Gupta.
During his sit-down, Redfield said he believed that COVID-19 likely originated in a lab - and not from a Chinese wet market.
While Hahn suggests he was screamed at by Trump's Health and Human Service Secretary Alex Azar, he also stood behind the decision to give the Trump-touted drug hydroxychloroquine an emergency use authorization.
That EUA was later revoked when hydroxychloroquine was found not to be an affective COVID-19 treatment.
Hahn continued to back that decision too.
