President Joe Biden said on Friday that he is “very confident” in Dr. Anthony Fauci amid criticism of the administration’s premier medical adviser by some lawmakers.
“Do you feel confident in Dr. Fauci?” a reporter asked Biden as he walked out of a press briefing in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
“Yes, I feel very confident in Dr. Fauci,” Biden responded a few seconds later.
Fauci has remained at the center of media reports and Republican ire all week after thousands of his email correspondences were published on Tuesday from the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
WHITE HOUSE BALKS ON ADDRESSING FAUCI EMAILS
One email shows EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, whose organization has been involved in research at the Wuhan lab at the center of inquiries into the coronavirus’s origins, thanking Fauci for dismissing the theory that the coronavirus may have been created in the lab.
Republican lawmakers have expressed their discontent with Fauci in a range of responses following the email dump.
Asked Friday if he still has faith in Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden tells reporters in the press pool he’s “very confident” in Fauci. pic.twitter.com/C2uSjIH7ju
— DJ Judd (@DJJudd) June 4, 2021
“Fauci lost my trust long before this,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, said on Twitter. “Never contextualizing his statements, never giving honest risk assessments, always treating us like we are too stupid to do anything but lockdown and wear masks forever. The emails show it was worse than we thought.”
“Big Tech was censoring posts about the Wuhan lab leak,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise tweeted. “The media was calling people who talked about the Wuhan lab leak conspiracy theorists. All while Fauci himself was emailing about COVID-19 possibly leaking from the Wuhan lab.”
Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican and a repeated thorn in Fauci’s side, reiterated his calls for the doctor’s firing following the reports on his emails.
When asked on Friday whether she could think of a circumstance in which Biden would fire Fauci, White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded, “No.”
Psaki also said on Thursday that it’s “obviously not that advantageous” for her to comment on the email exchanges.
“Let me just say on Dr. Fauci and his emails: He’s also spoken to this many, many times over the course of the last few days, and we’ll let him speak for himself. And he’s been an undeniable asset in our country’s pandemic response,” Psaki said during a press briefing.
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Fauci, meanwhile, has insisted that his emails can be easily misinterpreted.
“The only trouble is they are really ripe to be taken out of context, where someone can snip out a sentence in an email without showing the other emails and say, ‘Based on an email from Dr. Fauci, he said such and such,’ where you don’t really have the full context,” Fauci said in a Wednesday interview.
