‘You Made Fauci a Star!’ Megyn Kelly Grills Trump on Covid, Makes Bizarre Claim ‘A Lot of People’ are ‘Vaccine-Injured’
Megyn Kelly grilled former President Donald Trump over his administration’s coronavirus response and especially his elevation of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
In her interview with Trump for her SiriusXM show, Kelly brought up the ex-president’s past comments on why he didn’t fire Fauci when he was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. As Trump interjected, “I didn’t listen to him too much,” Kelly continued to say, “not only did you not fire Fauci, who is loathed by many — millions of Republicans in particular, but also some Democrats — You made him a star.”
“This is the criticism of you, that you made him the face of the White House Coronavirus Task Force,” Kelly said. “That he was out at every presser, that he was running heard for the administration on Covid, and that you actually gave him a presidential commendation before you left office. Wouldn’t you like a do-over on that?”
Trump denied knowing about a presidential commendation to Fauci, insisting, “I wouldn’t have done it.”
“I overrode many of the things he did. He was much less important to me,” Trump continued. “Now, with that all being said, he’s been there for years. He was respected. He lost a lot of the respect because of Covid. But he was respected. And on Covid, if you know what I did, I let the governors run their states and many of the governors opened up their states. Some of them didn’t.”
Kelly has made her dislike of Fauci abundantly clear in the past, so she continued to press Trump on why he didn’t fire Fauci. “Wouldn’t you like to go back and try to clip his wings?” she asked. “This guy was pushing mask mandates on us. He wanted the most extreme measure at every turn.”
TRUMP: Okay, look, I’m not one that blames a system that if you’re civil service or if you have some other protection, that you can’t get fired because I’ve done things that are a lot worse than that.
KELLY: You’re big on the firing.
TRUMP: So, so yeah, I fired a lot of people. I fired Comey and that was one of the great firings. I fired Comey and then I fired a lot of other people in the FBI, and they were great firings because the deep state, and they were at work and they were not good people. But I wasn’t, I was not a big fan of Fauci. If you look at Ron DeSanctimonious, he was, this guy said the greatest things. I can give you articles. That Fauci is great. He’s wonderful. We love him. We don’t do anything without Fauci. This went on for months.
KELLY: But he didn’t listen to Fauci.
TRUMP: He did a hundred percent. Look –
KELLY: He shut down Florida for a month.
TRUMP: I will give you, he shut down Florida –
KELLY: For a month.
TRUMP: Oh, he shut it down for a lot of longer.
As Trump continued to attack Gov Ron DeSantis over his Covid response, Kelly got the conversation back on track by grilling Trump on Operation Warp Speed and the development of Covid vaccines.
“They were rushed through. They have helped, but also hurt a lot of people, And your White House actually supported mask mandates,” Kelly said. “So wouldn’t you like a do-over on any of that?”
Look, when this came in, nobody knew what the hell it was. It sounded like an ancient, you know, ‘a pandemic.’ You thought that was from 200 years ago or from 1917, we never thought you’d have a pandemic. Nobody had any idea. We got word that bad things were happening in China, right around the Wuhan clinic. And I was the one that said it was in the Wuhan clinic. And, you know, I stuck with it. And it was, it was absolutely, it came out of the Wuhan clinic. But you take a look. And what we did was, this was brand new. Nobody knew what the hell it was. There’s dust. Somebody said there’s dust coming in from China and it’s killing people in Italy and it’s killing people in France and it’s going to kill people here. And by the way, I shut it down to China.
That was a big move. I saved thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives by doing it. But honestly, nobody, I don’t blame a lot of people because nobody knew what it was. Now we do understand it somewhat. Nobody really understands it, even now, fully. But nobody knew what Covid was.
As Trump went on a tangent about vaccines and mandates, Kelly butted in to say, “I’m not somebody who denies some of the good that the vaccines did. I lived through that, too. But of course, a lot of people have been vaccine-injured. And that’s one of the questions. Those people are mad that they were rushed through and that they can’t sue.” Trump responded by complimenting his own “tremendous job” in dealing with Covid while grumbling, “I never got the credit I deserve on Covid.”
The CDC lists a number of adverse reactions to Covid vaccination.
While some Americans have seen adverse reactions to the vaccines, the number of “vaccine-injured” is an infinitesimal fraction of the millions that have died or been hospitalized with Covid itself. Despite a campaign to undermine the vaccine that has grown in popularity on the right, the vaccine remains overwhelmingly safe and effective against Covid, and the chances of death or severe illness with Covid are significantly higher for the unvaccinated than the vaccinated.
Watch above via The Megyn Kelly Show.
