A trio of GOP senators is calling for Dr. Anthony Fauci to step down as a top health official in the Biden administration or be fired.
Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Tom Cotton (R-AR) all told Fox News in separate statements that Fauci’s resignation is needed to restore the trust of the American people in the federal government’s health guidance.
“Fauci needs to step down,” Blackburn said. “And the Biden Administration should ask him to step away from his post.”
Rubio said: “For 16 months we have seen Dr. Fauci withhold information, dismiss plausible explanations of COVID’s origin, and outright lie to Congress.”
“He is supposed to be a fact-based public health official, not a pundit distorting the truth to conform with his personal judgment,” he added. “If President Biden is committed to science and finding the truth about COVID, he needs to fire Fauci.”
Cotton stated: “Dr. Fauci has lost the confidence of the American people with his repeated evasions, misdirection, and politicized statements. If he won’t resign, Joe Biden should fire him.”
The calls increased pressure on Fauci comes as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) appears to be growing more defensive against his critics since the publication of thousands of pages of his emails at the beginning of the month. In a Wednesday interview on MSNBC, Fauci accused his critics of attacking “science and the truth.” He claimed that all his public statements given surrounding COVID-19 have been “consistently” been based on science.
Host Chuck Todd keyed up Fauci asking the NIAID director for “his level of concern” that constant criticism of Fauci would destroy the public’s trust in health officials.
“It’s very dangerous, Chuck, because a lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” Fauci responded. “Because all of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning have been fundamentally based on science. Sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people, and there was pushback against me.”
“So if you are trying to get at me as a public health official and scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you are attacking science. And anybody that looks at what is going on clearly sees that. You have to be asleep not to see that,” he continued. “That is what’s going on. Science and the truth are being attacked.”
On June 1, BuzzFeed and The Washington Post both published batches of Fauci’s emails from early in the COVID-19 pandemic, sparking several revelations about the doctor. In one instance, Fauci was found to have received and ignored an email from Erik Nilsen, who has a PhD in applied physics, showing evidence that China was lying about their COVID infections and deaths. As The Daily Wire reported:
In mid-March 2020, a physicist sent an email to Dr. Anthony Fauci that China was lying about the number of deaths in China due to the coronavirus, writing that he had been “modeling this outbreak since January,” adding, “The data posted by China is not only garbage, it has misled the world into a false sense of security” vis-à-vis “death rate, age vs. death” and “I truly believe the outbreak tsunmai in the USA is either already happened or is about to happen. As you know, as soon as a surge is sensed, the Tsunami will immediately follow. I believe we missed the containment boat quite a while ago.”
Fauci forwarded the email to a member of the NIH, writing, “Too long for me to read.”