Trump administration's lack of honesty in handling COVID-19 'very likely' cost lives: Fauci

Chief Medical Advisor to the US President, Anthony Fauci said that the lack of truthfulness from the previous President Donald Trump`s administration pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic "very likely" cost American lives.

"We don't have everything perfect right now. And we are going to make some missteps," he said, appearing virtually at a US Conference of Mayor's panel discussion. "When we do make missteps, what we are going to do is try and correct them."

Fauci said that it`s "not helpful" when "you're starting to go down paths that are not based on any science at all," adding that he doesn`t wish to rehash the ways in which the Trump administration steered away from science.

The Biden administration's approach to handling the Covid-19 pandemic will be "completely transparent, open and honest" with the American people, said Fauci on Thursday.

"If things go wrong, not point fingers but to correct them. And to make everything we do be based on science and evidence," he told reporters.

Fauci said that it was "uncomfortable" when things like hydroxychloroquine were promoted as treatments for Covid-19 when they weren`t based on fact and that he takes "no pleasure at all in being in a situation of contradicting the President."

The medical advisor to Biden said that it is a "liberating feeling" to now be able to "talk about what you know, what the evidence, what the science is," without fear of repercussions.

The United States is the nation hardest-hit by COVID-19, with 24.51 million cases and 409,987 deaths by early Friday morning. More than 4,000 Americans died of the disease on Thursday for the second day in a row.

Fewer than half of the nearly 38 million vaccine doses shipped to date by the federal government have actually made it into the arms of Americans, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on Thursday.

Some individual states have lagged behind with just a third or 40 per cent of their vaccine allotments being administered as of Thursday, which marked the one-year anniversary of the first locally transmitted COVID-19 case documented in the United States.

A key problem is organizing the distribution of vaccines to smaller clinics and pharmacies - rather than just to large medical centers and retail pharmaceutical chains.