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Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, says the United States is facing a "concerted challenge" to navigate the resurgent Covid-19 outbreak — but if Americans band together, the nation can avert another extended shutdown. "There seems to be a misperception that either you shut down completely and damage a lot of things, mental health, the economy, all kinds of things, or let it rip and do whatever you want," Fauci told POLITICO’s “Pulse Check” podcast on Wednesday. "There's a stepwise fashion that you can open up the economy successfully." (Diamond, 8/6)

Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious diseases expert, said early Thursday that he believes coronavirus cases could be “way down” by the time the elections come in the first week of November. “It’s up to us. It’s really in our hands. I really do believe based on the data we see in other countries and in the United States, in states and cities and counties that have done it correctly, that if we pay attention to the fundamental tenets of infection control and diminution of transmission, we could be way down in November. It is entirely conceivable,” Fauci said on CNN's "New Day." (Axelrod, 8/6)

As Dr. Deborah L. Birx was taking heat from both President Trump and Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week, the Democratic governor of Kentucky spoke up in her defense. Dr. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, had visited his state in late July, after he issued a statewide mask order and was contemplating even more aggressive steps, including closing down bars, Gov. Andy Beshear recounted on a private conference call with Vice President Mike Pence and the rest of the nation’s governors. It was a difficult move for a Democrat in a Republican state, but Dr. Birx provided him cover. (Gay Stolberg, 8/6)

In a commentary published yesterday in JAMA, experts from Stanford and Johns Hopkins universities implored the public and elected official to stop the recent wave of attacks on US public health officers amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Across the United States, public health officers have been subjected to armed people protesting on their front lawns, vandalism, harassing phone calls and social media posts, threats of violence or death, and doxing (the publication of private information to help others target the officer for harassment). Even some White House officials and members of Congress have joined in the fray, criticizing leading public health officials such as Anthony Fauci, MD, and Deborah Birx, MD. (Van Beusekom, 8/6)

With the novel coronavirus pandemic impossible to ignore out of existence, President Donald Trump has found a new foil -- in science. The Union of Concerned Scientists has documented 11 times across nine federal agencies when it says the Trump administration's attacks on science have directly undermined the federal government's response to the crisis, including the stalling of Centers of Disease Control and Prevention guidance and changing COVID-19 data collection services to be housed under the Department of Health and Human Services instead of the CDC. (Cathey, 8/6)

Five former directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who came together to speak about the coronavirus on Thursday said repeatedly that the United States is still struggling to deal with the pandemic because of one thing: mixed messages from leadership. "This is the first public health response where the ground rules weren't set up that we would be driven by the best available public health science," said Dr. Richard Besser, who served as acting director of the CDC in 2009. (Rivas, 8/7)