Dr. Antony Fauci has hit out at the abuse he has been getting by the right-wing media and conspiracy theorists over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying they amount to an "attack on science."
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has long been a target by conservatives during the entire pandemic, especially during the presidency of Donald Trump.
He is being targeted once again following the release of thousands of his emails, published as part of a Freedom of Information Act request by a number of media outlets.
Among some of the lines that have been highlighted is the suggestion that COVID-19 may have been created in a lab in Wuhan, China, with many conspiracy theorists claiming it was concocted to be used as a biological weapon on the world.
Fauci has long believed that the virus was spread from animal to human, but has not completely ruled it came from a lab leak.
On Friday night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow noted that this is not the first time Fauci has come under attack during his decades-long career. In the past, he had effigies burned of him and people threatening him to his face during the 1980s Aids crisis.
During the interview, Maddow asked if Fauci is worried about the "re-upping of attacks" against him following the release of his emails.
"Well, I'm concerned about that more, because it's really very much an attack on science," Fauci said.
"The growing extraordinarily productive relationship that I had with the activists [in the 1980s], when they came to me with legitimate concerns that the federal government, the scientists, the regulatory enterprise, didn't fully appreciate that you needed to involve them in everything you do, because it was their lives that were at stake," Fauci said.
"So I did reach out to them. And it turned out to be an extremely productive relationship.
"The thread going through what's happening now is very much an anti-science approach. So that's a big, big difference," he added. "I'm a public figure, I'm gonna take the arrows and the swings. But they're just they're fabricated.
"My job was to make a vaccine and use my Institute and these talented scientists that we have there...And we succeeded. That's what I do, all the other stuff is just a terrible, not happy type of a distraction. But it's all nonsense."
Discussing the origin of the virus, Fauci said that despite the attacks he is receiving it is still important to find out where COVID-19 originally came from in order to prevent a similar worldwide pandemic from happening again.
"Is it a natural evolution? Or is it something that happened out of a lab and accident or what have you, it is important to understand that, but it is being approached now in a very vehement way, in a very distorted way.
"You should want to know how this happened, so that we can make sure it doesn't happen again," Fauci added.
"But what's happened in the middle of all that I become the object of extraordinary, I believe completely inappropriate, distorted, misleading and misrepresented attacks...And that's unfortunate."
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, domestic policy ... Read more
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