Anthony Fauci used his last Friday night before the election to give an interview to the Washington Post in which he praised Joe Biden’s attitude toward the Covid-19 pandemic and criticized President Donald Trump’s.

Intentionally or otherwise, Fauci put his thumb on the electoral scale by painting a doomsday picture of the nation’s Covid-19 outlook and suggesting the Democrat candidate is more focused on the pandemic than is the Republican incumbent. Asked about differences between the two on the virus issue, Fauci praised Biden for “taking it seriously from a public-health perspective,” and said Trump looks at it from the standpoint of “the economy and reopening the country,” according to the Post, which published its article Saturday evening.

Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, echoed Biden’s predictions of a "dark winter,” saying, “We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”

The doctor didn’t specifically attribute his gloomy assessment to Trump’s policies, but Biden has made the virus outbreak the centerpiece of his campaign, repeatedly blaming the president for the nation’s Covid-19 death toll, which stands at more than 230,000.

Fauci complained to the Post that Trump is increasingly leaning on medical adviser Scott Atlas for advice on the pandemic. “I have real problems with that guy,” Fauci said. “He’s a smart guy who’s talking about things that I believe he doesn’t have any real insight or knowledge or experience in. He keeps talking about things that, when you dissect it out and parse it out, it doesn’t make any sense."

Fauci said in April that Trump had immediately backed all the Covid-19 mitigation recommendations made to him by US public health officials, including Fauci himself. In September, he said the president had taken the outbreak very seriously from the beginning.

White House spokesman Judd Deere blasted Fauci for “choosing three days before an election to play politics,” after previously praising Trump’s actions.

“As a member of the (White House coronavirus) task force, Dr. Fauci has a duty to express concerns or push for a change in strategy, but he’s not done that, instead choosing to criticize the president in the media and make his political leanings known by praising the president’s opponent – exactly what the American people have come to expect from the swamp,” Deere told the Post.

Fauci said in February that the risk of coronavirus in the US was “relatively low,” and told CBS’s 60 Minutes program in March that “people should not be walking around with masks.” By October, he was voicing support for a national mask mandate.

Atlas contended in an interview with RT’s Going Underground show that Covid-19 lockdowns have been an “epic failure” and are “killing people” without curbing the spread of the virus.

“The public-health leadership have failed egregiously, and they’re killing people with their fear-inducing shutdown policies,” Trump’s coronavirus adviser said.

Investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel took to Twitter to criticize Fauci for attacking Atlas while offering “zero evidence, data, etc,” calling the comments “a little character-assassination attempt by the tiny totalitarian.”