During an appearance on MSNBC this week, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health went after the Republicans who have used recently released emails of his as an excuse to go after him as part of their bizarre obsession with the top public health official. The emails have revealed that Fauci privately left open the possibility that COVID-19 emerged from a lab leak, a possibility that conspiratorially minded Republicans have recently seized upon as part of some weird scapegoating effort rather than a serious attempt to credibly assess the origins of the pandemic.
The idea underlying recent Republican criticism of Fauci seems to be that he has been inappropriately dismissive of the idea that COVID-19 may have emerged from a lab, although at this point, there is no conclusive evidence of lab emergence of the virus. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who pretty much always seems to behave with a pompous air of self-importance, called on Fauci to resign after the release of those emails, writing on Twitter that the “time has come for Fauci to resign and for a full congressional investigation into the origins of #COVID19 – and into any and all efforts to prevent a full accounting.”
Discussing the criticism that he has faced, Fauci commented as follows:
‘It’s really very much an attack on science… I mean, it is what it is. I’m a public figure, I’m going to take the arrows and the slings, but they’re just — they’re fabricated, and that’s just what it is… My job was to make a vaccine and use my institute and these talented scientists that we have there and that we fund in the various universities to get a vaccine that was highly safe and highly effective, and we succeeded… All the other stuff is just a terrible, not happy type of a distraction. But it’s all nonsense.’
Check out Fauci’s comments below (if there’s an issue displaying the video, please refresh the page and/ or wait a moment):
