WASHINGTON – Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson’s comments this week about the coronavirus crisis brought a rebuke Friday from one of the government’s leading health experts, Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

At Friday’s regular White House briefing on coronavirus, a reporter asked President Donald Trump to respond to Johnson’s widely publicized remarks that, “We don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways” and that no more than 3.4% of those infected will die. The Republican senator appeared to be suggesting that the government was overreacting to coronavirus, the reporter said.

Johnson made the comments Tuesday in an interview with the Journal Sentinel.

Trump eventually asked Fauci to take the question.

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“First of all, I think that’s a false equivalency to compare traffic accidents with (coronavirus) — that’s totally way out,” said Fauci. “When you have something new and it’s emerging, and you really can’t predict totally the impact it’s going to have, and you take a look at what’s gone on in China and you see what’s going on right now — right now — in Italy, and what’s happening in New York City, I don’t think with any moral conscience you can say, ‘Why don’t we just let it rip and happen and let ‘x’ percent of the people die.' I don’t understand that reasoning at all.”

In the interview, Johnson said, “getting coronavirus is not a death sentence except for maybe no more than 3.4 percent of our population (and) I think probably far less.”

The senator also said he was not saying that governments are overreacting to coronavirus.

“No. I don’t want to say that. I really don’t want to say that. It may be exactly what we need to do. But again, what I do want to do is put this all in perspective as we move forward here,” he said in the interview, saying that while coronavirus is clearly far more lethal than the flu, it is “probably not worth shutting our economy down.”

Said Johnson in the interview:

“I’m hoping when all is said and done, maybe we have overreacted. But the fact that we’re acting the way we are, I think, will really increase our chances of dropping that growth curve of this (virus). So, again, I’m not being critical of what people are doing. But we also need to really understand the costs of potentially going too far here.”