Dr. Anthony Fauci told Rachel Maddow on Friday that he had long wanted to be a guest on her MSNBC program but that the Trump administration had not allowed him to appear.

“I’ve been wanting to come on your show for months and months,” the nation’s top infectious disease expert and an authority on the coronavirus pandemic, told Maddow. “You’ve been asking me to come on your show for months and months, and it’s just gotten blocked.”

Fauci added: “Let’s call it what it is: It just got blocked because they didn’t like the way you handle things, and they didn’t want me on.”

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he told officials that he liked Maddow and that she was “really good,” but it didn’t “make any difference.”

But look for major changes, he promised. “I don’t think you’re going to see that now” in Joe Biden’s administration, Fauci said. “I think you’re going to see a lot of transparency. ... You’re not going to see deliberate holding back of good people when the press asks for them.” (Check out the clip above.)

Fauci told CNN on Friday that the Trump administration’s mangling of facts and sound scientific advice regarding COVID-19 “very likely cost lives.”

When “you start talking about things that make no sense medically and no sense scientifically, that clearly is not helpful,” he added.

Fauci told Maddow, a progressive voice in TV news, that working in the Trump administration was a “tough situation; it really was.”/ HUFFPOST