Dr. Anthony Fauci is hitting back after the recent fallout from the newly disclosed emails, saying his detractors’ criticisms of him are “fabricated.”
After 3,200 pages of Fauci’s emails entered the public domain following a Freedom of Information Act request, the immunologist was peppered with accusations that his private correspondence did not match his public rhetoric and actions, claims that Fauci said were “fabricated,” “distorted,” and “inappropriate.”
“I’ve become the object of extraordinary, I believe, completely inappropriate, distorted, misleading, and misrepresented attacks … and that is unfortunate,” he told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow during Friday night’s broadcast of The Rachel Maddow Show.
FAUCI INSISTS RECENTLY PUBLICIZED EMAILS ABOUT CORONAVIRUS CAN BE ‘TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT’
Fauci told Maddow that the U.S. government’s efforts to unearth the origins of COVID-19, the subject of much of the criticism toward Fauci, is not intended to be “contributory to the development of drugs or vaccines,” but rather part of plans “to prevent this from happening again.”
“There’s this concern: ‘Is it a natural evolution, or is it something that happened out of a lab, an accident or what have you?’ It is important to understand that, but it is being approached now in a very vehement way, in a very distorted way, I believe, by attacking me,” he said. “I think the question is extremely legitimate. You should want to know how this happened so we can make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”
The response is an escalation from Fauci’s Thursday response to the controversy, in which the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said his emails could be “taken out of context.”
“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,” he said in an interview with NewsNation’s Leland Vittert.
The chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden has made headlines ever since both Buzzfeed and the Washington Post published thousands of pages of emails on Tuesday, many of which Republicans say reveal contradictions. In one email from last February, Fauci was questioned about whether face masks could help prevent the transmission of COVID-19.
“The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out [the] virus, which is small enough to pass through the material,” he wrote in response to the recipient, who is presumed to be Sylvia Burwell, the secretary of health and human services under former President Barack Obama. “It might, however, provide some slight benefit in [keeping] out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you.”
Soon afterward, Fauci began recommending the use of face masks to prevent the disease’s transmission, and many states imposed mask mandates shortly thereafter. The immunologist said the recommendation was designed to stave off a mask shortage, adding that “there were no data then” about the masks’ efficacy.
Another email showed EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, whose organization has been involved in research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, thanking Fauci after he publicly dismissed the idea that the coronavirus may have been created in the lab. Fauci thanked Daszak for the “kind note.”
During a May 4, 2020, National Geographic interview, Fauci laughed off the possibility that COVID-19 escaped from a lab, arguing that “a number of very qualified evolutionary biologists have said that everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that it evolved in nature and then jumped species.” A Washington Examiner review shows he worked behind the scenes in early 2020 to cast doubt on the lab leak hypothesis.
Fauci has since amended his stance, saying he is uncertain whether COVID-19 could have originated in the Wuhan lab.
“No, actually. … No, I’m not convinced about that. I think that we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we find out to the best of our ability exactly what happened,” he said when asked by Politifact last month about whether he was still confident that COVID-19 emerged naturally. “Certainly, the people who’ve investigated it say it likely was the emergence from an animal reservoir that then infected individuals, but it could’ve been something else, and we need to find that out.”
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While Democrats have defended Fauci, with Biden insisting he remains “very confident” in his chief medical adviser, many Republican officials have called for the doctor to be fired or even prosecuted.
“Told you,” Sen. Rand Paul, a frequent Fauci critic, posted on Twitter, along with the hashtag “#FireFauci.”
“Can’t wait to see the media try to spin the Fauci FOIA emails,” the Kentucky Republican said.
