I would characterize your quote as selective, and this is just from the article (we don’t know the full story). He said it partially changed based on the science, and partially on political reality. I don’t know if that was the right thing or not for him to do. However, you’re omitting: “We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”

So it’s really an educated guess, and he took a lower estimate. People don’t do well with ranged and errors— just look at how stocks move based upon whether they beat or not their analyst estimates in quarterly reports… they almost always are within the range stipulated but people pick the middle value and hold everything to it.

None of this would cause me to characterize him as untrustworthy. We need far more Faucis in this world.