Nearly half of Americans, and a majority of young people, say Dr. Anthony Fauci should “resign his position and role” in the United States’ COVID-19 response.
A new poll from Trafalgar Group and Convention of States Action, provided exclusively to Morning Wire and released on Thursday, shows Fauci’s flagging support among likely voters. The Trafalgar Group conducted a poll of 1,081 likely general election voters in the United States on January 12-14. The poll has a margin of error of 2.98%.
When asked “Do you believe Dr. Fauci should resign his position and role in leading the government’s COVID-19 response to allow new leadership?” 46.3% of respondents said they believe Fauci should step aside. The other 53.7% of respondents said Fauci, who serves as chief White House medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, should remain in charge.
The bulk of Fauci’s support comes from Democrats, according to the poll. About 83% of Democratic respondents said Fauci should keep his position while about 18% of Democrats want the federal government’s chief medical expert to resign.
Outside of the Democratic Party, Fauci’s popularity is underwater as Republicans and voters who do not identify with either of the two main political parties generally support Fauci’s resignation. From the poll, 76.6% of GOP respondents said Fauci should step aside and let someone else guide the U.S. response to the pandemic. Among non-partisans, 58.9% of likely voters say that Fauci should resign.
Among young people aged 18-24, Fauci’s leadership is deeply unpopular. Among respondents, 82.5% of likely voters in that age bracket supported Fauci stepping down. Just 17.5% said that the doctor should stay. The age bracket of 25-34 years old nearly flips the views of the young group, with 71.1% saying Fauci should stay while just 28.9% say that Fauci should resign. In the older age brackets of 35-44, 45-64, and 65+, respondents favored Fauci, supporting him by 57.4%, 50.5%, and 53.6% respectively.
Male respondents largely went against Fauci while the doctor enjoyed support from most women. 59.9% of men said Fauci should step aside, while just 34% of women felt the same. 66% of female respondents said that Fauci should stay.
The polling sample size favored Democrats, with 39.3% of respondents identifying as Democrats, 35.6% of respondents identifying as Republicans, and 25.1% identifying with neither major political party. The polling sample was also weighted more toward females, with women making up 53.3% of respondents and men making up the other 46.7%.
Fauci has taken heavy criticism from Republicans over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Republicans in the House have vowed to investigate the chief White House medical adviser should the GOP take back the House in 2022.
“If the American people put us back in charge, we are definitely going to [investigate Fauci] because we now know without a doubt that Dr. Fauci knew on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 that this thing came from a lab,” Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) said Sunday in an interview on Fox News. “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 in 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 continued. “The interesting thing is. We point this out. We just learned this last week, the two doctors who were most adamant that this thing came from a lab early on: one is Dr. Kristian Anderson. On Jan. 31, 2020, he says this to Dr. Fauci in an email: ‘Virus looks engineered. Virus not consistent with evolutionary theory.’ So, he knew it came from a lab.”