In the wake of released emails to and from the top U.S. Infectious Disease Expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is asking President Joe Biden to “follow the science” and fire him.
“Fauci is exploiting his position in government — and his ill-deserved positive reputation in the liberal media — to willfully misrepresent what is meant by a lab leak, conflating it with a biological weapons program (which is just one possible motive for gain-of-function research in Wuhan). That, or he is showing his age,” Rubio said in a column published Saturday. “During the campaign, Biden said, ‘I'll choose science over fiction.’ Now is his chance to make good on that promise and fire Dr. Fauci.”
The more than 800 emails from early in the pandemic, were released due to a freedom of information request by Buzzfeed and show Fauci making contradictory statements and opinions from what he was saying to the nation publicly at the time.
In those emails, Fauci expressed an open mind about the theory that the virus came from a leak at a Wuhan virology lab, while publicly dismissing the possibility when testifying in front of a Senate Committee under questioning by Rubio last month.
Fauci defended his public position that the there was a “high likelihood” the virus came from animals rather than a lab.
“It will be decades before we know the true cost of the coronavirus pandemic. The virus killed millions across the globe, forced countless small businesses closed, and made billions of people prisoners in their homes. But the impact on our children and long-term health effects will not be known for some time,” Rubio said in his column. “No effort should be spared to understand COVID-19’s origins. We cannot ignore common-sense possibilities just because they are inconvenient for one political party or one nation. It was never ‘conspiratorial’ to suggest that the first human infection of the coronavirus could have resulted from a laboratory accident.”
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis also blasted Fauci during a press conference on June 3 explaining why he was suing the CDC to get cruise lines up and running in his state.
“(The CDC) is saying you have to wear a mask when you are sunbathing, some of this stuff they have actually put out there,” DeSantis said. “You have Fauci in his emails admitting that masks don’t even stop COVID, even though he was getting all the kids to be masked for all this time.”
On Friday White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that there were no circumstances where Biden would fire Fauci, the New York Post reported.
“He’s overseen the management of multiple global health crises and attacks launched on him are certainly something we wouldn’t stand by,” Psaki said. “I understand there’s interest in the emails. He’s answered a lot of questions on the emails, I don’t think I’m going to have much more to add on them from here.”
The virus has infected more than 33 million and killed 593,377 in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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