(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) During an appearance on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, soon-to-be-retired COVID czar Anthony Fauci claimed those who continue to deny the Left’s narrative about the Jan. 6 uprising at the U.S. Capitol were also responsible for his failure to contain the deadly coronavirus pandemic, Breitbart reported.
“What we’re dealing with now is just a distortion of reality,” insisted Fauci, who long denied the possibility that COVID-19 originiated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology—at tremendous cost to his own credibility and moral authority.
“I mean conspiracy theories which don’t make any sense at all, pushing back on sound public health measures, you know, making it look like trying to save lives is encroaching on people’s freedom,” he continued.
After expressing frustration in recent weeks over the public’s disregard for his latest diktats, Fauci announced on Monday that he plans to retire in December. Many speculate that he hopes to dodge accountability from a Republican-led Congress intent on investigating his mishandling of the pandemic.
Despite having made the choice to enter into the political fray with his regular media appearances undermining former President Donald Trump while presenting disputed—and later debunked—information as fact, Fauci coyly suggested to the far-left Maddow that his own motives were sterling.
He opened the interview by suggesting that he would go on “to serve as hope and inspiration” to Americans who are worried that their fellow citizens might be science-deniers.
Maddow then asked the doctor to comment about the political atmosphere.
“There have been a lot of theories and conspiracy theories and accusations and more or less wild claims about the origins of COVID in particular,” Maddow claimed.
“It seems like that’s when people on the political right really started getting their claws into you and targeting you personally during this pandemic,” she continued. “Does it feel a little different?”
According to Fauci, the recent criticism is more nefarious than what he has faced in the past.
“It’s phenomenally, 100% different,” he complained. “It’s apples and elephants difference.”
Fauci then proceeded to project his own gaslighting onto members of the political Right, claiming it was they who were denying the empirical, objectively verifiable reality in favor of “a world where untruths have almost become normalized,” where “we can see something in front of our very eyes and deny it’s happening.”
He cited as an example the Jan. 6 uprising.
“You have some people who actually don’t believe it happened,” Fauci claimed, without evidence.
Such denials are, in his view, “now spilling over in denial about public health principles.”
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
