‘He’s a super-spreader’: Obama hits out at Trump’s threats to fire Fauci as nation sees record-breaking infections

While campaigning for Joe Biden on the eve of Election Day in Miami, Barack Obama criticised Donald Trump’s "Covid spreader tour” – the president’s marathon rallies across the US that have been linked to coronavirus outbreaks. 

“America just had its single worst week of new cases, and so what’s Trump’s closing argument?” Mr Obama said.

"He’s a super-spreader," he said. "Nothing is more important to him than crowds to make him feel good, as opposed to making the American people safe."

The former president also criticised the president’s attacks against Dr Anthony Fauci, including his recent suggestion that he plans to fire the nation’s leading infectious disease expert should he win re-election. “The one guy who has been taking it seriously all along that he hasn’t paid attention to,” Mr Obama said.

Covid-19 infections in the US broke a single-day record on 30 October, with more 100,00 cases, eight months into a pandemic that has infected more than 9.2 million Americans and killed more than 231,000 people in the US.

Since Friday, more than 2,200 more people have died from the disease.

“This is his last chance to explain why we should give him four more years,” Mr Obama said of the president’s “closing argument” for his re-election.

“What you hear him talking about is his inauguration crowd being smaller than mine," he said, repeating a punchline he has made on the trail for his former vice president in recent days. “After four years that’s what he’s still worrying about. Let it go. What is his obsession with crowd size? Does he have nothing better to worry about? Did no one go to his birthday party when he was a kid?”

A research paper from Stanford University found that more than 30,000 coronavirus cases have been linked to the president’s campaign rallies.

The findings have not yet been peer-reviewed; they were published on the platform SSRN. Researchers have routinely shared preliminary findings to share potentially critical information with other analysts and institutions during the public health crisis.

In a statement, Trump campaign spokesperson Courtney Parella said that “Americans have the right to gather under the First Amendment to hear from the President of the United States.”

The campaign has offered masks and hand sanitiser to attendees, and posted signs encouraging attendees to wear face coverings, though many people in the often densely packed crowds do not wear them, and the president has routinely mocked others for doing so.

A statement from the Biden campaign said that the president is “costing hundreds of lives and sparking thousands of cases with super spreader rallies that only serve his own ego.”

Campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said that “the worst part” of the paper’s findings – which collected information from 18 rallies held between June and September – do not capture the “super-spreader events on White House grounds or the last five weeks of events across the country.”

"How many more lives have been upended in that time? How many more empty seats are there at kitchen tables across America because of Donald Trump’s ego?” he said.