Dr. Fauci has hit back against those wishing to see him prosecuted over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The now retired Fauci, 82, called his accusers ‘insane,’ during an interview with CNN’s Jim Acosta Saturday.
He said he and his family are still receiving death threats due to his response to the 2020 pandemic – months after stepping down from his role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Acosta also asked Fauci about Elon Musk’s December tweet which mocked transgender pronouns while calling for criminal charges. The message read: ‘My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.’
‘What’s your response to that?’ the host asked.
‘There’s no response to that craziness, Jim. Prosecute me for what? What are they talking about? I wish I could figure out what the heck they’re talking about. I think they’re just going off the deep end,’ the nation’s top infectious disease expert railed.
‘It just doesn’t make any sense to say something like that, and it actually is irresponsible,’ he blasted.
Speaking about how his family deals with the negative publicity around his stewardship of the pandemic, Fauci said it was ‘difficult.’
‘I mean, they don’t like to have me getting death threats all the time. Every time someone gets up and spouts some nonsense that’s misinformation, disinformation and outright lies, somebody somewhere decides they want to do harm to me and or my family,’ he said.
‘That’s the part of it that is really unfortunate… The rest of it is just insanity, the things they’re saying. But it does have a negative effect when people take it seriously and take it out on you and your family.’
The doctor described the view that it was ‘unacceptable’ to have a ‘political view on a public health problem’ as these issues create a ‘common enemy.’
During his time in office between 1984 until 2022, Fauci dealt with the thorny questions around health crises from HIV/AIDS to avian flu and Ebola.
The veteran immunologist has served as an adviser to seven U.S. presidents beginning with Republican Ronald Reagan and has had over 50 years of public service.
At the time of the Musk tweet, the White House voiced full-throated support for Fauci.
‘They are disgusting, and they are divorced from reality, and we will continue to call that out and be very clear about that,’ Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters afterwards.
House Republicans have been using their new majority power to investigate all aspects of the pandemic, including the origin, as well as what they contend were officials’ efforts to conceal the fact that it leaked from a lab in Wuhan.
Days earlier, the GOP released emails showing that Fauci commissioned a February 2020 paper to disprove the possibility that COVID originated in a lab — before publicizing the study at a White House news conference weeks later.
In February, Republicans sent letters to Fauci, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines, Health Secretary Xavier Beccera and others as part of their investigative efforts.
The letters do not require the cooperation of recipients. But in announcing the Republican staff report in December, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, chair of the virus subcommittee, said that lawmakers would issue subpoenas if potential witnesses didn’t cooperate.
Republicans have accused Fauci of lying to Congress when he denied in May that the National Institutes of Health funded ‘gain of function’ research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world — at a virology lab in Wuhan.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, even urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Fauci’s statements.
