Fauci Rips ‘Unchecked’ Fox News Personalities After Jesse Watters ‘Kill Shot’ Rant: ‘That’s When I Get More Death Threats’
After Jesse Watters’ metaphorical “kill shot” rant, Dr. Anthony Fauci ripped Fox News over “unchecked” attacks from personalities that he says result in more death threats.
Fauci spoke at length to Dylan Stableford and Kate Murphy of Yahoo! News Tuesday, a day after Watters made inflammatory remarks to a crowd at a Turning Point USA event.
They asked Fauci about attacks from the likes of anti-vax crank RFK Jr., which the doc lamented are “a shame because he comes from such an extraordinarily distinguished family, many members of whom I know personally.”
When Fauci was asked if he’s still receiving death threats, he name-checked Kennedy, but also brought up Watters without mentioning his name.
“Oh, the answer is yes, and it even gets accelerated when you have the inflammatory statements that are made, like people like RFK Jr. and some of the Fox media personalities that [are] unabashedly making extraordinarily inflammatory statements,” Fauci said.
He added that “in my mind, it’s strange that they go unchecked, with no consequences, for people to say that. And when they do that publicly, that’s when I get more death threats, “And when they do that publicly, that’s when I get more death threats and people harass me, my wife, and my children.”
Fauci called the dynamic a”sad testimony on our society.”
On Tuesday morning, Fauci demanded Watters be fired “on the spot” over an eight-minute rant in which the Fox host described before an audience how ordinary citizens could create a viral moment by confronting Fauci in public and filming it. But he did so using inflammatory language.
He told the crowd “You got to ambush a guy like Fauci,” and laid out a scenario in which “you’re going for the kill shot. The kill shot with an ambush is deadly because he doesn’t see it coming.”
“Now you get that footage to us. You get it to Fox,” Watters said. “Just make sure it’s legal.”
Fox News defended Watters in a statement to Mediaite, writing “Based on watching the full clip and reading the entire transcript, it’s more than clear that Jesse Watters was using a metaphor for asking hard-hitting questions to Dr. Fauci about gain-of-function research and his words have been twisted completely out of context.”
Watch above via Yahoo! News.
