Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), made statements contradicting some of his past statements about the COVID-19 pandemic while testifying before Congress on Monday.
The former top pandemic adviser under two presidential administrations and head of NIAID, who retires in 2022 after nearly four decades in the role, faced tough questioning from Republicans on the House COVID-19 Special Subcommittee about his change of course.
“Americans have been aggressively bullied, shamed and silenced for simply questioning or discussing issues like social distancing, masks, vaccines or the origins of COVID,” Sen. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said in his opening remarks to the 83-year-old Dr. Fauci.
“You took the position that you presented the ‘science’ and your word was taken as final and absolute on matters relating to the pandemic,” the chairman added, before he and other Republican committee members walked back on those comments.
6 feet away
- “Anyone who looks at this carefully will see that there are clear anti-science overtones to this,” Fauci said. He said this in an interview on November 28, 2021. He told CBS News’ “Face the Nation”: “So if they stand up and criticize the science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about. But if they stand up and really point a gun at Tony Fauci, well, people will be able to recognize that there’s a human being there. He has a face, he has a voice, they can see him on TV. So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing the science, because I represent science. And that’s dangerous.”
- “It just kind of came out of the blue. I don’t remember,” Fauci said in a January congressional interview about the social distancing mandates imposed on federal agencies, businesses and schools. “It was just an empirical decision, not based on data, not based on achievable data.”
- “When I said there was no scientific evidence, I meant prospective clinical trials to determine whether six feet is better than three feet. [or] “It was better than 10,” Fauci said in testimony Monday, adding that it was a “CDC decision.”
- “We’ve discussed it at the White House,” he acknowledged when asked why the mandate wasn’t changed, “but the CDC decision is theirs to make, and they’ve made it.”
Masks are required even for children as young as 5
- “Wearing a mask might make you feel a little bit better, and it might block some droplets, but it’s not perfect protection,” Fauci said in a March 2020 interview on “60 Minutes.”
- Fauci has also shifted his stance to support mask-wearing, even calling for masks to be required for school children as an “extra precaution.” Interview in July 2021 On “CBS This Morning.”
- “This was in a context where, at the time, we were seeing 4,000 to 5,000 people dying a day,” Fauci said at Monday’s hearing, before acknowledging that “there were no studies putting masks on children.”
Opposition to the coronavirus vaccine is “ideological nonsense”
- “The evidence is that if you make people’s lives difficult, they forget the ideological nonsense and get vaccinated,” Fauci said in the October 2020 audiobook of “Fauci,” a biography of him written by New Yorker journalist Michael Specter.
- “That’s not what I was referring to,” Fauci said Monday, saying opposition to COVID vaccines “isn’t actually ideological nonsense.”
Those who support the lab leak are spreading “conspiracy theories”
- Asked whether federal public health officials or White House officials had participated in an effort to pressure big tech companies to censor or downplay supporters of the lab leak claim, Fauci said, “Not on my side.”
- “But look at the facts: I’ve remained impartial throughout the entire process,” Fauci said.
- In an October 2020 email to Dr. Fauci, then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins called for the “swift and thorough” removal of leading epidemiologists, including Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who drafted the Great Barrington Declaration, which opposed COVID-19 lockdowns and other mitigation measures.
- Fauci and Collins were also part of the effort to produce a controversial research study titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which was pushed to disprove the lab leak theory.
- “I’ve heard these conspiracy theories,” Fauci said in a February 2020 podcast appearance about concerns about ties between the Chinese military and the Wuhan Institute of Virology that were later confirmed in a U.S. intelligence assessment. “They’re just conspiracy theories.”
Vaccine is a ‘dead end’ for COVID
- “When you get vaccinated, you’re not only protecting your health and the health of your family, you’re also contributing to the health of the community by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community,” Fauci said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” in May 2021. “In other words, it’s an end stop against the virus.”
- Asked about it Monday, the former NIAID director responded: “Vaccines save lives. It’s very clear that vaccines have saved hundreds of thousands of Americans. … Initially, the vaccines clearly prevented a percentage of people from getting infected, but the duration of protection was not long-lasting and was measured in months.”
- “We could not prevent transmission when our ability to prevent transmission was weakened,” he added.
