Dr. Anthony Fauci Says He's Unfazed By GOP Pledge To Investigate Him Over COVID
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Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday said Republican threats to investigate him if the GOP wins control of the House in November’s election weren’t a factor in his decision to retire from government at the end of the year.
Fauci announced this week that he would step down from leading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and as chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden.
Fauci, the face of the government’s pandemic response through the Donald Trump and Biden administrations, has been vilified and threatened with violence for stressing vaccines and other public health safety measures.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy vowed to “hold [Fauci] accountable” if Republicans retake power in the House, accusing him of being responsible for closing schools and businesses during the height of COVID.
Dr. Fauci lost the trust of the American people when his guidance unnecessarily kept schools closed and businesses shut while obscuring questions about his knowledge on the origins of COVID.
He owes the American people answers. A @HouseGOP majority will hold him accountable.— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) August 22, 2022
Fauci told CNN’s “New Day” his decision to retire had been a long time coming.
“I have nothing to hide and I can defend everything I’ve done so that doesn’t faze me or bother me,” Fauci said. “My decisions of stepping down go back well over a year.”
Dr. Fauci will be stepping down as Director of NIAID and Chief White House Medical Adviser in December. He joins New Day for his first TV interview since making the announcement: pic.twitter.com/Og9qJKIqaE
— New Day (@NewDay) August 23, 2022
Other right-wing figures also seized on Fauci’s announcement to deliver a fresh thrashing.
Fox News personality Tucker Carlson called him a “dictator” and “a dangerous fraud, a man who has done things that in most countries, at most times in history, would be understood perfectly clearly to be very serious crimes,” according to the Daily Beast.
Carlson previously called the infectious-disease expert “an even shorter version of Benito Mussolini.”
Fauci told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins he welcomes oversight and would consider testifying before GOP-led committees, but said he’s only been subjected to “character assassination.”
“I’d be happy to cooperate so long as we make it something that is a dignified oversight, which it should be, and not just bringing up ridiculous things and attacking my character,” he said. “That’s not oversight.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) used a Senate hearing earlier this year to accuse Fauci of supporting National Institutes of Health funds for China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, located near the live animal market where COVID was first discovered in humans.
Fauci told CNN the coronavirus remains the biggest public health threat.
“We’ve got to do better than what we’ve done and hopefully we’ve learned important lessons through this painful two-and-a-half-year experience that we’ve been through,” Fauci said.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
