Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) attacked Anthony Fauci over the weekend after a clip of former news correspondent Terry Moran saying the former health official influenced ABC News’s COVID-19 coverage went viral on social media.
While speaking on “The Fifth Column” podcast last week, Moran recounted an experience in “early” 2021 when a story he did about COVID-19’s origins was influenced by a legal review overseen by Anthony Fauci.
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“We talked to molecular biologists, we talked to people in the Trump administration, people who had been in the Trump administration, we broke a little news that that lab had been funded by the Chinese military,” Moran said while describing the story, which was about the possibility COVID-19 originated from a laboratory rather than an animal market.
“And we’re ready to go, and the day that it’s supposed to air, it gets reviewed,” he said. “And it comes back to me and it is incomprehensible. And I’d never been angrier. I’m in the booth,” Moran said, before podcast co-host Michael Moynihan asked him if it was a legal review.
“Lawyer’s standards,” Moran confirmed, “and, I was told: Fauci. And I said, ‘I can’t do this,’ and they’re going to air, and it’s a 15-minute piece or whatever. And I’m cursing and screaming in the booth… and I’m just absolutely livid, beside myself,” Moran said.
DeSantis described the clip as a “pathetic indictment of ABC News” while Paul said “the Anthony Fauci led coverup extended to his editorial control of ABC News.”
Fauci has faced renewed scrutiny over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in recent weeks after he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination over 100 times at a Senate hearing spearheaded by Paul. Since-released text messages between then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy also showed Fauci offered a different assessment of the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy in public than he did in private.
“I’ve never watched that story and I never want to because it wasn’t mine, I didn’t think,” Moran said. “And because, most importantly, because it was incomprehensible, they’d put so many caveats in there and it was so legalized,” he said.
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In a recent Substack essay, Moran said the network also often left out pro-Trump perspectives. “Were we biased? Yes. Almost inadvertently, I’d say,” he said in the article.
Moran was fired from ABC News in June 2025 for violating its news policies after he released a post on social media calling White House advisor Stephen Miller a “world-class hater.” He served as senior national correspondent for seven years.
