Dr. Anthony Fauci says his critics are avoiding the “important questions” surrounding the coronavirus pandemic.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases joined SiriusXM’s Doctor Radio’s Doctor Radio Reports and spoke with host Dr. Marc Siegel. In the interview, which is set to air Wednesday, Fauci opened up about what he views as the unwarranted politicization of a public health crisis.
“The only thing that I care about, that I’ve devoted my entire professional career, including the almost 40 years that I’ve been director of NIAID, is to get the basic and clinical science to work for the safety and the health of the American public,” Fauci said.
Noting that the United States is a world leader, Fauci said, “It is very unfortunate the distraction of those who would politicize me by saying things that just don’t make any sense, Marc, because the only thing I talk about out is things like getting vaccinated, getting boosted, wearing a mask, getting us to do the research, to be able to get interventions. And for that, by some people, I’ve been villainized.”
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“I don’t quite get that, except that that’s the hard knocks of being in a situation that’s become politicized,” he added. “It’s so unfortunate that in our era now, where we’re all trying to fight against a common enemy, which is the virus, that some people use that for political purposes. And that’s really unfortunate because that does nothing but endanger the lives of our citizens.”
Fauci also opened up about personal attacks directed at him.
“It’s unfortunate. Of course it doesn’t feel good, Marc. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s purely political,” he said. “And then I feel worse about — I feel less worried about the attacks on me than I feel about the politicization of a pure public health issue. We should not be doing that. We should be all pulling together to end this pandemic rather than making it ad hominems, which are really preposterous.”
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Fauci, who is the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, referred to contentious hearings in which he has clashed with Republican senators, including Rand Paul of Kentucky and Roger Marshall of Kansas, whom he called a “moron” in a hot mic moment during a heated exchange this month over public financial disclosures.
“I mean, you’ve seen them — those at the hearings and other places where instead of asking questions that are important questions about where we’re going with the outbreak, it becomes pure ad hominem, which of course doesn’t feel good, but it doesn’t make any sense either,” Fauci said.
In addition, Fauci addressed the origins of COVID-19, a topic on which he has also faced intense scrutiny. The first cases of COVID-19 were detected in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, and ever since, there has been debate about whether the virus came from a lab leak and questions about the National Institutes of Health, the parent agency of NIAID, collaborating with the facility.
“We always have to keep an open mind on this, Marc, as always, but if you talk to the real card-carrying molecular virologists and molecular viral geneticists, they feel that the evidence and the circumstances weigh very, very strongly that this is a natural occurrence in the sense of jumping from an animal species — a bat, maybe — to an intermediate host, to a human,” Fauci said. “Very similar to what was proven to be the case with SARS-CoV-1 as well as with MERS, with the bat to the camel to the human. Again, but you always have to keep an open mind that it could have been something that had been put into a lab to be studied and perhaps leaked out. But most, if not all, of the real card-carrying virologists feel that it was naturally occurring out of the environment from an animal to a human.”
