Dr. Anthony Fauci warned CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta against taking him out of context after responding to his question at the White House coronavirus task force briefing on Tuesday.
Acosta, the president's favorite reporter, asked the doctors if the U.S. could have prevented more coronavirus deaths by working to mitigate it sooner with more social distancing guidelines.
Following up on Dr. Deborah Birx's initial answer, Dr. Fauci said, "If there was no virus in the background, there was nothing to mitigate. If there was a virus there that we didn’t know about, then the answer to your question is probably yes."
He continued, "The only trouble with that is that whenever you come out and say something like that, it always becomes almost a soundbite that gets taken out of context."
Both Birx and Fauci also said that it was unclear exactly when the virus started infecting people in the United States.
Dr. Fauci added, "In a perfect world, it would have been nice to know what was going on there, and we didn’t,” he said. “But I believe, Jim, that we acted very, very early in that."