Here’s one example of him advising that it might be useful: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fauci-throws-cold-water-trum...

And yeah, his language is imprecise enough that you could pick it apart and find a reasonable motivation behind it if you looked hard enough. But even a really charitable reading can only upgrade his remarks from “flagrantly dangerous” to “unnecessary and not very helpful”, and we should expect more from the president than that.