OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Outgoing lead immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci responded to a social media dig from Elon Musk after the Twitter CEO suggested that the Biden administration’s chief medical adviser should be prosecuted.
In a Sunday tweet, Musk noted that his “pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” without elaborating.
That post after a meme he shared depicting Fauci informing President Joe Biden, “Just one more lockdown my king.”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2022
In an interview with the journal Nature, Fauci responded that he did not have time to “waste” on that kind of online harassment.
“I don’t pay attention to that, Max, and I don’t even feel I need to respond…” Fauci replied to reporter Max Kozlov, according to the Daily Beast. “A lot of that stuff is just a cesspool of misinformation, and I don’t waste a minute worrying about it.”
Fauci is set to step down as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, a post he has held since the early 1980s. But House Republicans have vowed to hold hearings and call him in to testify about various aspects of the COVID pandemic, including reports that his agency may have funded risky research at a Chinese lab where the virus may have originated.
For his part, Fauci has responded to those threats.
“There have been all these House Republican calls for investigations into the origins of Covid and saying they’re gonna bring you up to Capitol Hill. Do you think that wanes as you step down?” ABC ‘Face The Nation’ host Margaret Brennan said on Sunday.
“Well, I don’t think it’s gonna wane for me. The Republican House has said that they’re gonna — and that’s fine with me,” the doctor said.
“You’ll appear?” the host said.
“Oh, of course. I mean, I’m very much in favor of legitimate oversight. Absolutely. I mean, I’ve testified before Congress, given the 38 years that I’ve been director, literally hundreds of times in many oversight hearings,” he said.
“They’ve clearly politicized it — I’m not political at all, period,” he said. “I’ve never been. And anybody who knows anything about me knows that that’s the case. But it is very clear when people are running their campaigns with an anti-Fauci element to it. I mean, that’s ridiculous. I mean, this is a public health issue.”
“I’d be more than happy to explain publicly or otherwise everything that we’ve done, and I could defend and explain everything that we’ve done from a public health standpoint present by,” he said.
NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci tells @margbrennan he will testify in front of the next Congress if called upon. “The Republican House has said that they're going to and that's fine with me.” pic.twitter.com/dT6YzIbJ9E
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) November 27, 2022
Fauci is set to address reporters on Tuesday, in what is expected to be the last time he gives a briefing before he leaves government for the first time in five decades at the end of the year. But that is not going to save him from the new Republican Congress and its investigations, one GOP lawmaker vowed.
“Fauci is scheduled to give a final briefing today before he leaves government. He thinks resigning will prevent him from being held accountable. He’s wrong. We’ll be bringing him in ASAP,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) tweeted.
Fauci is scheduled to give a final briefing today before he leaves government.
He thinks resigning will prevent him from being held accountable.
He's wrong.
We'll be bringing him in ASAP.
— Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) November 22, 2022
That comes a month after Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul threatened an investigation into Fauci if Republicans won in the midterms.
“If we win in November, if I’m chairman of a committee, if I have subpoena power, we’ll go after every one of [Fauci’s] records,” Paul said in October. “We’ll have an investigator go through this piece-by-piece because we don’t need this to happen again.”
Other Republican lawmakers have made similar pledges.
“If the American people put us back in charge, we are definitely going to do this,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) also said before the midterms, adding that his colleagues would push for a congressional investigation into the origins of the coronavirus.
“Because we now know without a doubt that Dr. Fauci knew on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 that this thing came from a lab,” Jordan argued. “The top scientists in the country were saying it came from a lab. One scientist says we got the notes now from the conference call on February 1st. One scientist says, ‘I don’t see how this can happen in nature, but it would be easy to do in a lab.’”
“And yet just in a matter of days, they changed their position, write the article that appears in Nature of Medicine Magazine, which then gets cited in the now-famous letter The Lancet, which became the gospel for the fact that Fauci can go out and tell people it didn’t come from a lab when in fact they knew it did,” Jordan added.
