WATCH: Dr. Fauci slams media for attempting to divide him and Trump

“Hypothetical questions sometimes can get you into some difficulty, because it’s ‘what would have or could have.’ The nature of the hypothetical question was if in fact we had mitigated earlier could lives have been saved. And the answer to my question was, as I always do, and I’m doing right now, perfectly honestly say yes, obviously. Mitigation helps. I’ve been up here many times telling you mitigation works. So if mitigation works, and you instigate it and you initiate it earlier, you will probably have saved more lives. If you initiated it later, you probably would have lost more life. You initiate it at a certain time.

“That was taken as a way that maybe somehow something was at fault here. So let me tell you from my own experience, and I can only speak from my own experience. We had been talking before any meeting that we had about the pros and the cons, the effectiveness or not of strong mitigations. So discussions were going on mostly among the medical people about what that would mean. The first and only time that Dr. Birx and I went in and formally made a recommendation to the President, to actually have a ‘shut down,’ but to really have strong mitigation, we discussed it.

"Obviously there would be concern, by some, that in fact that might have some negative consequences. Nonetheless, the President listened to the recommendation and went to the mitigation. The second time I went with Dr. Birx into the president and said 15 days are not enough, we need to go 30 days… the president went with the health recommendations and we extended it another 30 days.”

Fauci has been one of the three faces of medical expertise at daily coronavirus press briefings, along with Dr. Deborah Birx and Surgeon General Jerome Adams.

The tweet that instigated the rumour was from a retweet from President Trump as to the nature of the media complaints about his handling of the crisis early on.