Dr. Fauci, an influential member of President Trump’s coronavirus task force, told the Fox News show “Watters’ World” over the weekend that as the disease spread to more people in mid-January in Wuhan and the surrounding Hubei province, the Chinese government said that human contagion was minimal, a fact that shaped for weeks the outside world’s sense of the danger and the appropriate response.

Both assertions were “clearly not correct … that was misinformation right from the beginning,” he said. COVID-19 was, in fact, a highly contagious and deadly disease.