On Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared in a wide-ranging, hour-long interview on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan. It was obviously an opportunity for Fauci, the only remaining health agency head from the Trump administration, to go on the offensive before Dr. Scott Atlas’s book, A Plague on Our House, releases on December 7. In interviews for the book, Atlas has asserted that the triumvirate of Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, and Dr. Robert Redfield engaged in groupthink, uninformed by current research or conversations with outside experts.
A recently published excerpt gives a specific example of Redfield ignoring research about preexisting immunity in congressional testimony. The book is sure to provide even more insight into the pandemic response with Atlas bringing the receipts. So CBS gave Fauci an opportunity to throw former colleagues Redfield and Birx under the bus and distance himself from the public health response. Instead, Fauci took credit for the development of the vaccines and once again claimed to “represent science.”
In the exchange, he accused Sen Rand Paul (R-Ky.) of lying about the nature of the research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. When Brennan asked him how he dealt with criticism and threats, he said:
I dealt with it by focusing on what my job is from the time that I went into medicine to right now, where I am at my age, my job has been totally focused on doing what I can with the talents and the influence I had to make scientific advances to protect the health of the American public. So anybody who spins lies and threatens and all that theater that goes on with some of the investigations and the congressional committees and the Rand Pauls and all that other nonsense, that’s noise, Margaret, that’s noise. I know what my job is.
Fauci went on to characterize Paul questioning his credibility with regard to funding research in Wuhan:
Anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this. So if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about. But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people could recognize there’s a person there. There’s a face, there’s a voice you can recognize, you see him on television. So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous. [Emphasis added]
Paul, who is also a physician, responded, pointing out something even more dangerous: Fauci’s arrogance.
The absolute hubris of someone claiming THEY represent science. It’s astounding and alarming that a public health bureaucrat would even think to claim such a thing, especially one who has worked so hard to ignore the science of natural immunity. https://t.co/rcDezphVRR
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) November 28, 2021
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Fauci also made a bizarre reference to the events of Jan. 6 in response to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) calling for his prosecution:
Brennan: Senator Cruz told the attorney general you should be prosecuted.
Fauci: Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?
Cruz is not a doctor. He’s a skilled attorney. First, he made a brief opening statement:
Fauci is an unelected technocrat who has distorted science and facts in order to exercise authoritarian control over millions of Americans.
He lives in a liberal world where his smug “I REPRESENT science” attitude is praised.
Here are the facts:
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 28, 2021
Then, he laid out his detailed case, including the evidence and the applicable code. Cruz contrasted Fauci’s congressional testimony on May 11 with a statement by the NIH made in October. During his Senate testimony, under questioning from Paul, Fauci said, “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” In October, the NIH admitted they funded an experiment in Wuhan that tested if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.” Cruz asserted that it constitutes gain-of-function research.
Cruz points out that both of these statements cannot be true because they directly contradict one another. He notes that 18 U.S. Code § 1001 makes Fauci’s statement a felony if he indeed lied to Congress during his testimony. Cruz closed with, “No amount of ad hominem insults parroting Democrat talking points will get Fauci out of this contradiction. Fauci either needs to address the substance—in detail, with specific factual corroboration—or DOJ should consider prosecuting him for making false statements to Congress.”
In testimony before the Senate Health, Labor, Education, and Pensions Committee on Nov. 4, Paul again brought up NIH research funding at the Wuhan lab. “The preponderance of evidence now points toward this coming from a lab and what you’ve done is change the definition on your website to try to cover your a** basically,” Paul told Fauci.
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Paul described the research using details from a 2015 research paper on the experiments done there. He accused Fauci of obfuscating the facts to protect his reputation:
Paul: You know that but you continue to mislead. You continue to support NIH money going to Wuhan. You continue to say you trust the Chinese scientists. You appear to have learned nothing from this pandemic…
Fauci: I don’t have any more to say, except to say, as usual, I have a great deal of respect for this body, the Senate, and it makes me very uncomfortable to have to say something. But he [Paul] is egregiously incorrect in what he says.
Paul: History will figure that out on its own.
According to Rasmussen, like Paul, Americans want to know the truth. In May, 84% of Republican voters, 82% of Democrats, and 80% of voters not affiliated with either major party said it is vital for federal authorities to investigate the virus’s origin. By October, a plurality of 49% believed Fauci was lying to Paul. Fauci making light of investigations is probably not going to play well with any demographic and will only serve to increase his decline in overall approval.
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