Dr. Anthony Fauci said he and his family have received threats since the start of the coronavirus pandemic and that he now has a security detail.
“The kind of not only hate mail, but also serious actual threats against me, are not good,” Fauci said Thursday on CNN’s The Axe Files podcast. “I don’t see how society does that.”
Fauci confirmed to host David Axelrod, President Barack Obama’s former chief strategist and senior adviser, that he has been assigned a security detail, given the magnitude of the threats.
“It’s tough. Serious threats against me, against my family, my daughters, my wife — I mean, really? Is this the United States of America? But it’s real,” he added.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been a target among some supporters of President Trump who are opposed to public health restrictions and guidances put in place to stop the spread of COVID-19.
Fauci, who has led the institute since 1984, said during the interview that the threats and hate he has experienced since the start of the pandemic is of a greater scale than when he was working to contain the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s.
“I’ve seen a side of society that I guess is understandable, but it’s a little bit disturbing,” Fauci said. “Back in the day of HIV, when I was being criticized with some hate mail, it was more, you know, people calling me a gay-lover and, ‘What the hell are you wasting a lot of time on that?’”
“I mean, things that you would just push aside as stupid people saying stupid things,” he added. “It’s really a magnitude different now.”
The U.S. has had more than 4 million cases of the coronavirus since the pandemic began and is fast approaching 145,000 total deaths associated with it.
