Public transparency in public health information is "absolutely essential," Fauci said in an interview with the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, which was posted online Wednesday by the Project On Government Oversight.
"It's absolutely essential because if you're going to make scientific-based public health recommendations, everything has got to be transparent," Fauci, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, told the group of government watchdogs.
"Otherwise once you lose the confidence of people, they don't believe what you're saying or they believe you're holding things back or they believe there's a political motivation to things," Fauci said. The interview was conducted last week and made public after inquiries by the project.
"And we've got to admit it, those of us in government, all of us, you and I and all of the people that work for me, and all the people that work for you, that there is a building distrust now in the transparency of what we do," he added.
"It's the elephant in the room."
Governments must be transparent in health crisis
Fauci, the director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, didn't say why he believes Americans' distrust is building, only that he believes it is. There are have been missteps by both the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Food and Drug Administration in the country's pandemic response.
"If we deny it, we're not being realistic because people all say the same thing: 'Are you sure you're telling us the truth? Do we really know how many people got exposed or not?'" he said.
Governments must be transparent in a public health crisis, said Fauci, who has worked on responses to epidemics and outbreaks ranging from AIDS in the 1980s to Zika in the past decade.
"If you go back over outbreaks in the past, the one thing that has always prevailed as the things that make things work is when people are open and honest and don't hold information back," he said.
Fauci never mentioned President Donald Trump by name, but he did make a comment that seemed to address Trump's remarks caught on tape earlier this year in an interview with journalist Bob Woodward when the president said he intentionally downplayed the dangers of the coronavirus because he didn't want to alarm people.
"The issue that people say you don't want to alarm people is totally nonsense," Fauci said.
"In anything we've ever done in our history, you know from world wars to depressions to anthrax attacks, now to an outbreak like this, the thing that gets people spooked is when they don't know what's going on, not when you tell them what's going on," he said.
"We're a pretty strong country. We can handle the truth."
Always tell truth to power
"Always tell the truth," even if it's something people don't want to hear or even if it could cost you your job, Fauci said in the interview.
"If in fact, somebody does want to shoot the messenger and say 'I don't like what they're saying, I don't want to talk to them anymore,'
