Fauci: Personal Attacks against Me Are ‘Attacks on Science’

Dr. Anthony Fauci equated the personal attacks he’s faced to “attacks on science” during an appearance on MSNBC Wednesday.

Asked by host Chuck Todd whether he’s concerned about media outlets or individuals discrediting public health authorities, as evident in Russia, Fauci answered, “A lot of what your seeing as attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science because all of the things I have spoken about 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 a scientist, you’re really not only attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re attacking science,” he continued.

The chief medical advisor to the president claimed that it is undeniable that the criticism he’s received, some of which stems from the contradictory messaging found in his recently leaked email correspondence, is really an assault on truth.

“And anybody who looks at what’s going on clearly sees that. You have to be asleep not to see that. That is what’s going on. Science and the truth are being attacked,” Fauci added.

Thousands of Fauci’s emails were just released in response to a FOIA request from Buzzfeed News, leading many to question his credibility as a public health official. In one of Fauci’s emails, Peter Daszak, who directed millions in U.S. funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) as part of his role running the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, thanked Fauci for publicly dismissing the theory that coronavirus originated via an accident at the lab.

Fauci’s statement also comes after he defended the U.S. funding of projects at the WIV, going so far as to deny that the U.S. ever funded gain-of-function research — or research designed to make viruses more infections — at the WIV, despite the existence of public NIH documents which mention the research.

In line with the CDC consensus, Fauci discounted for months the hypothesis that COVID escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China as a conspiracy theory. The explanation that the pathogen may have escaped from the lab earned renewed mainstream acceptance last month after The Wall Street Journal’s reporting discovered that three researchers at WIV were hospitalized in November 2019 with symptoms associated with the virus.

Despite Fauci’s declaration that all of his directives and decisions have been backed by science, his reversal on mask-wearing suggests otherwise. Fauci initially told the public that masks would not be effective in staving off the virus, only to reverse himself weeks later and announce that he misled the public to prevent a run on masks that would be most needed by medical workers.

More recently, Fauci has taken to insisting that he never advised the public that masks weren’t beneficial. He has also suggested that while masks may not be very effective in containing the virus, the face covering serves as a psychological reminder of the pandemic, rather a “symbol” encouraging COVID mitigation behavior, social distancing, and other practices to “slow the spread.”

In another email exchange, Dr. Josh Backon of Hebrew University blasted Fauci for seemingly disregarding the use of inexpensive anti-viral drugs such as Chloroquine and Ivermectin with well-documented efficacy in treating COVID-19. Backon sent an initial email offering the case for these treatments, and then later re-sent the email with an attached link to a study substantiating his assertions with the phrase, “Continue ignoring me.” Fauci responded saying, “You’re not being ignored,” and said that “National Heart Lung and Blood Institute will take a look at this.”

Commenting on the email dump in an interview on NewsNation Now last Wednesday, Fauci said that “they are really ripe to be taken out of context where someone can snip out a sentence in an email without showing the other emails and say, ‘based on an email from Dr. Fauci, he said such-and-such,’ where you don’t really have the full context.”