Conservative podcaster Dave Rubin cursed out former White House senior medical adviser Anthony Fauci during a live Fox News segment Monday night following a congressional hearing on the COVID pandemic.
Fauci testified before the Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Monday where members of Congress pressed him on the origins of the pandemic, which is believed to have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China. Fauci argued the origins are still unknown and doubled down on his push for lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
“There’s another part of that testimony where he says he blames two to three thousand COVID deaths on podcasters for spreading misinformation about vaccines. I would like to say, as an unvaccinated podcaster, I want to use my words carefully here, Anthony Fauci … can go fuck himself,” Rubin said.
.@RubinReport: “Anthony Fauci can go f*ck himself…” pic.twitter.com/wlqOF5safV
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 4, 2024
Fauci has been accused of lying to Congress in 2021 after reports presented evidence that the National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded gain-of-function coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The NIH admitted in October 2021 that its grantee, EcoHealth Alliance, began conducting the research between June 2018 and May 2019, but had failed to immediately notify the agency that they created lab-generated chimeric coronaviruses that massively increase in growth.
Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice (DOJ) in July alleging Fauci lied to Congress, which could carry a five-year sentence. (RELATED: ‘He Belongs In Prison!’: Hearing Goes Off Rails When MTG Refuses To Call Fauci ‘Doctor’)
“There’s probably never been a government official caught more red-handed, lying to us,” Paul said. “He has proved the lie in his own words. So at first he kind of acted like ‘Oh we don’t have anything to do with the research over there, we don’t fund the research in Wuhan, so we found the actual scientific papers, we found the grant number proving it came from his agency. And then he said, ‘Oh well, we’re funding it, but it’s not gain-of-function. My experts up and down have looked at this and it’s not gain-of-function.'”
Email transcriptions released by Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee found that Fauci and other public health leaders were warned of the possibility of COVID being created by gain-of-function research in early 2020.
President Joe Biden’s administration and Democratic lawmakers have scrutinized Republicans for alleged personal attacks and their attempts to prosecute him for falsely saying the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research.
“We’ve been very clear about this. These attacks, these personal attacks that we have been seeing are dangerous on Dr. Fauci and other public health professionals as well,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in December 2022. “They are disgusting and they are divorced from reality, and we will continue to call that out and be very clear about that. Again, these are incredibly dangerous—these personal attacks that we are seeing.”
Fauci expressed shock over the “level of vitriol” during the congressional hearing during a Monday night interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
