President Trump publicly signalled his frustration on Sunday with Dr Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious disease expert, after the doctor said more lives could have been saved from the coronavirus if the country had been shut down earlier.

Trump reposted a Twitter message that said “Time to #FireFauci” as he rejected criticism of his slow initial response to the pandemic that has now killed more than 22,000 people in the US. The President privately has been irritated at times with Dr Fauci, but the Twitter message was the most explicit he has been in letting that show publicly.

Trump retweeted a message from a former Republican congressional candidate. “Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could’ve saved more lives,” said the tweet by DeAnna Lorraine, who got less than 2 per cent of the vote in an open primary against Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month. “Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the US at large. Time to #Fire Fauci.”

In reposting the message, Trump added: “Sorry Fake News, it’s all on tape. I banned China long before people spoke up.”

The tweet came amid a flurry of messages blasted out by the President on Sunday defending his handling of the coronavirus.

Trump did not “ban China”, but he did block non-American citizens or permanent residents who had been in China in the past 14 days from coming into the US starting on February 2. Despite the policy, 40,000 Americans and other authorised travellers have still come into the country from China since that order.

Dr Fauci and other public health experts were initially sceptical that the China travel restrictions would be useful when the President was first considering them, but then changed their minds and told Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, on the morning of January 30 that they supported them.

New York Times News Service

, but experts have said the

limits were useful mainly to buy time that the administration did not then use to ramp up widespread testing and impose social

distancing policies before infections could begin growing exponentially.

By mid-February, advisers had drafted a list of measures like school closures, sports and concert cancellations and stay-at-home

orders, but the president did not embrace them until mid-March.

Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, said on Sunday that earlier

imposition of such policies would have made a difference.

“I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could

have saved lives,” he said on “State of the Union” on CNN. “Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those kinds

of decisions is complicated. But you’re right. Obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may

have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down.”

Dr. Fauci’s comments, and the president’s pushback, come at a critical time as Mr. Trump wrestles with how fast to begin reopening

the country. Public health experts like Dr. Fauci have urged caution about resuming normal life too soon for fear of instigating

another wave of illness and death, while the president’s economic advisers and others are anxious to restart businesses at a time

when more than 16 million Americans have been put out of work.

MORE ON TRUMP’S TWEETSRead the full article on President Trump’s flurry of messages defending his handling of the coronavirus.