House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) called on Dr. Anthony Fauci to resign from his position as director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during an interview on Saturday, saying that the American people have lost trust in Fauci and that this was not about politics.
McCarthy made his remarks in the wake of Fauci becoming mired in political controversy over emails from him that were released this last week. The emails have raised questions about his handling of the pandemic and what type of research U.S. taxpayer dollars funded. Fauci has responded by going on partisan left-wing television shows to attack his critics as being “anti-science.”
“Does Fauci need to go?” Breitbart News host Matt Boyle asked McCarthy during a radio interview on Saturday. “Does President Biden need to fire him? Does he need to resign?”
“Well, the number one thing, it has to be for the American public,” McCarthy responded. “Does the American public trust Dr. Fauci now that you’ve seen the emails? Now that you’re seeing the flip-flop of positions? And just now that he’s requesting from China to get the information?”
“You’ve got to trust the individuals to look into this,” McCarthy continued. “Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died. And if you’ve taken every certain position in it, how are you able to come back with the trust of the nation to get to the bottom of it? We have to know what went on, and who knew what and when. I mean, everything we’re finding there, how can the president — and I know the American people don’t have trust in Dr. Fauci.”
“Let’s find a person we can trust,” McCarthy added. “[Put] politics aside, we’re talking about American lives here. We’re talking about lives around the world. We’re talking about an administration that shifted course, when they first came in, the Biden administration, and gave millions of dollars back to the World Health Organization, that lied to the world, that is controlled by China. We watch that they changed the direction when we were standing up to China to appease China now. This is the wrong direction, and I don’t believe anybody in America can trust [inaudible] to get to the bottom of it.”
“So it sounds like you think he needs to go,” Boyle responded.
“Yeah, because you do not have the trust in him,” McCarthy answered.
Fauci responded to criticisms of him during an interview on Friday evening, saying that they were “really very much an attack on science.”
“What’s happening now is very much an anti-science approach,” Fauci claimed. “I mean, it is what it is, I’m a public figure, I’m going to take the arrows and the swings, but they’re just, they’re fabricated. And that’s just what it is … it’s all nonsense.”
Fauci claimed that the criticisms were “completely inappropriate, distorted, misleading and misrepresented attacks.”