Fauci Says Criticizing Him is ‘Dangerous’: ‘They’re Really Criticizing Science, Because I Represent Science’
Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that he felt it was “dangerous” to criticize him, arguing that those who did so threatened to “damage science.”
He made the comment in an interview with Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, who asked him about his critics, including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY). “It seems another layer of danger to play politics around matters of life and death,” Brennan said.
“Exactly,” replied Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “To me, that’s unbelievably bad, because all I want to do is save people’s lives. And anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this. So if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about. But if they get up and aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people can recognize there’s a person there.”
“So it’s easy to criticize,” he added. “But they’re really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous. To me, that’s more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me. And if you damage science, you are doing something very detrimental to society long after I leave.”
Fauci, the public face of U.S. efforts to respond to Covid-19 under President Joe Biden and previously under former President Donald Trump, faced criticism most recently after documents made public in September revealed the National Institutes of Health contributed $599,000 to research at the Wuhan lab connected to Covid-19 — despite months of vehement protestations and denials to the contrary by Fauci.
Paul shot back in a Sunday message on Twitter, writing, “The absolute hubris of someone claiming THEY represent science. It’s astounding and alarming that a public health bureaucrat would even think to claim such a thing, especially one who has worked so hard to ignore the science of natural immunity.”
Watch above via Face the Nation.
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com
