Fauci Torches “Crazy” MTG for Her Insane Attacks
After a tumultuous, side-winding hearing on Capitol Hill, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared particularly unimpressed by a line of questioning directed at him by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
During his testimony Monday before the House oversight committee about the origins on Covid-19, Greene torched Fauci, the medical leader of America’s pandemic response, refusing to refer to him as a doctor and claiming that he belongs “in prison” for committing “crimes against humanity.”
Afterward, Fauci took to CNN to explain how rhetoric like hers immediately and inevitably results in an increase in death threats for himself and his family.
“Whenever somebody gets up, whether it’s a news media—you know, Fox News does it a lot—or it’s somebody in the Congress who gets up and makes a public statement that I’m responsible for the deaths of x number of people because of policies or some crazy idea that I created the virus—immediately, it’s like clockwork, the death threats go way up,” Fauci told Kaitlan Collins.
“So that’s the reason why I’m still getting death threats. When you have performances like that unusual performance by Marjorie Taylor Greene in today’s hearing, those are the kinds of things that drive up the death threats because there are a segment of the population out there that believe that kind of nonsense,” Fauci said.
“there‘s always been differences of opinion, differences of ideology, criticisms, and things like that but the level of vitriol that we see now just in the country in general but actually played out during this hearing was really quite unfortunate because the purpose of hearings… pic.twitter.com/gDqk0ov2JY
— StudiGo (@StudiGo_LLC) June 4, 2024
But Greene wasn’t the only representative who threw inexplicable curveballs at the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Several GOP lawmakers all played the same game while Fauci was in the chair: New York Representative Nicole Malliotakis and Arizona Representative Debbie Lesko tried and failed to implicate him in popular conspiracy theories with evidence they didn’t have; committee Chair James Comer wouldn’t let him speak, claiming he had too many questions to get through; and Ohio Representative Jim Jordan threw him such irrelevant questions that it caused Fauci to ask, “What does that have to do with me?”
“I have testified literally hundreds of times over the last 40 years, over [at] Congress, and there’s always been differences of opinion, differences of ideology, criticisms, and things like that,” Fauci told CNN. “But the level of vitriol that we see now just in the country in general—but actually played out during this hearing was really quite unfortunate.”
And, ultimately, those questions distracted from and derailed a hearing with a real purpose: to educate Congress to better protect the American people ahead of another pandemic, according to Fauci.
Only time will tell if they learned something.