Coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci claimed on Wednesday that criticisms of him were “attacks on science.”
“It’s very dangerous,” he told MSNBC. “A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science, because all of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning have been fundamentally based on science.”
He continued and called Republican attacks on his record “preposterous” and “just painfully ridiculous.”
“People want to fire me or put me in jail for what I’ve done—namely, follow the science,” he claimed.
However, Fauci has admitted in the past that he denied the actual science by discouraging the use of masks during the early days of the pandemic because the federal government was worried there wouldn’t be enough personal protective equipment left for health care professionals.
“We were concerned the public-health community—and many people were saying this—were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply,” Fauci said last summer.
He also admitted that the reason the federal government changed its guidance was not because the science had changed, but because “the circumstances changed.”
Much of the recent criticism of Fauci, however, hasn’t been focused on his flip-flopping, but on his connection to dangerous gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Fauci, as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, green-lighted sending grant money to an organization, EcoHealth Alliance, that then used the NIH’s funding to sponsor Wuhan’s coronavirus research.
Unsurprisingly, Fauci denied that the WIV had anything to do with the coronavirus outbreak.
Only when dozens of scientific experts began to argue that the theory that COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab was plausible did Fauci admit that he wasn’t sure how the coronavirus originated.
Just this past week, Fauci changed his tune again, as Issues & Insights recently noted. When asked by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., about the National Institutes of Health’s coronavirus grants, Fauci downplayed them.
“The Wuhan lab is a very large lab to the tune of hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. The grant that we’re talking about was … an average of about $125,000 to $140,000 a year,” he said.
In other words, Issues & Insights argued, “Fauci went from no, not ever” to “so what” in a matter of days.
Moreover, Fauci lied about how much money the NIH actually gave to EcoHealth Alliance. A report from conservative watchdog Judicial Watch found that the NIH approved more than $826,277 in funding that eventually went to the WIV.
Recently published emails also prove Fauci was behind the scenes working to dismiss the lab-leak theory. He appears to have provided guidance to scientists who were pushing back against the lab-leak theory, and he was thanked by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak for dismissing the theory publicly.
Despite all of the evidence that is now stacked against Fauci, he claims he was wrongfully “picked as the villain.”
“As a scientist, as a health official, when those data change, when you get more information, it’s essential that you change your position because you’ve got to be guided by the science and the current data,” he said.
