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Twitter CEO Elon Musk has doubled down on previous calls for former lead immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci to be prosecuted.
Early Sunday morning, Musk responded to a tweeted question from ACT for America founder and chairwoman Brigitte Gabriel, who asked: “Do you agree with Senator Rand Paul? Should Dr. Fauci go to jail?”
In her tweet, Gabriel included a story from Conservative Brief in which Paul, himself a physician, once again called for Fauci to be held accountable for what he says is the former federal official’s alleged responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Certainly trial
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 23, 2023
Musk responded: “Certainly trial.”
The Twitter boss went after Fauci in a series of December posts, in which he mocked those who list their preferred pronouns in the accounts by writing, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”
My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2022
That came after a meme he shared depicting Fauci informing President Joe Biden, “Just one more lockdown my king.”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2022
Those posts led to a response of sorts from Fauci, who has since retired from his position as head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he had held since Ronald Reagan’s first term in the early 1980s.
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.”
House Republicans 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.
Fauci has responded to those threats as well.
“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 asked in a December interview.
“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,” Fauci responded.
“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
On Friday, Paul also doubled down on previous calls to hold Fauci responsible for what he believes was his agency’s role in funding dangerous “gain-of-function” research that took place at a Chinese lab in the city of Wuhan, where COVID is said to have originated.
During an interview on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,” Paul continued to demand that Fauci be held accountable for his alleged mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Kentucky Republican also said he believes Fauci’s unwillingness to acknowledge certain things about the pandemic and the origins of the virus could land him in serious trouble.
“Yeah, I think Fauci deserves culpability and history is going to judge him very poorly because he made the judgment to fund this research,” Paul said. “It’s dangerous research. He doesn’t want to call it gain of function, but most other scientists do call it gain of function, in Wuhan, in an opaque totalitarian country. And in the end, there was a leak from the lab and millions of people died worldwide.”
Paul also said that he believes Fauci was untruthful at times during his testimony before Congress, adding that “it’s a felony punishable by five years in jail” if someone is actually charged with lying under oath.
