One of the last times Anthony Fauci went on Fox News was March 14 when the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) joined Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”
That day was long before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lifted recommended restrictions on vaccinated individuals, long before CDC emails showed explicit collusion with teachers unions on school reopenings, long before the Wuhan lab-leak theory emerged as a plausible origin among legacy media, long before Facebook lifted its ban on content pointing to the theory, and long before a treasure trove of Fauci’s personal emails were made public to expose “America’s Doctor” as a political animal who operated in his own self-interest to suppress dissent to his Faucian prescriptions and cover his own possible role in the pandemic itself.
Still, the public deserved real answers about Fauci’s endless back-and-forth recommendations throughout the prior 12 months. Why the endless flip-flopping on masks? Why the endless flip-flopping on schools? Why should the public trust the NIAID director after he admitted to making up numbers for the vaccine threshold needed for herd immunity?
Instead, Wallace’s interview with Fauci included questions such as, “How much of a difference will it make if President Trump leads a campaign for the people who are the most devoted to him to actually go out and get the vaccine?”
Fauci appeared on the network one time after that, still long before any of the items listed above came to fruition, where he faced real questions from Neil Cavuto, who pressed a clearly frustrated Fauci on the idea of masking through 2022 and yearly COVID-19 shots in a brief network interview.
Fauci didn’t appear on the network after that, and once the emails dropped in May, a lot more questions about the NIAID director’s role in funding bat coronavirus research at the Chinese military-collaborative Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) remain to be answered.
Shortly after more than 3,200 pages of emails to and from Fauci’s inbox became public, exposing the government bureaucrat as a dismissive physician who rose to fame to cover his own scandal, the media-savvy politician masquerading as a public health official immediately recalibrated his schedule of press appearances to go on friendly outlets.
According to the temporary co-hosts of The Hill’s YouTube show “Rising,” Federalist Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky and The Intercept’s Ryan Grim, Fauci canceled his scheduled interview on the program set for June 3 the day before. Instead, Fauci went straight to MSNBC for his first post-email scandal interview with Nicolle Wallace, who fawned over the 80-year-old bureaucrat with predictable praise.
“I read through your emails that were released,” Wallace said, emphasizing Fauci passed “the test very few of us would pass” where “the true mark of someone is if they look good even when their personal emails come out.”
MSNBC’s @NicolleDWallace scores the first interview w/ Fauci since his emails were made public and uses it to say: “The true mark of someone is if they look good even when their personal emails come out, so you pass the test very few of us would pass." pic.twitter.com/SNMXBrXm5v
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 2, 2021
Wallace apparently missed the emails where Fauci dismissed early evidence that COVID-19 came from a Wuhan lab with funding from his own NIAID, disregarded early indications the virus was beyond containment, and contradicted his explanation for discouraging masks early on as merely concerned about their supply for health care workers.
A week later, Fauci gave another interview to MSNBC as calls grew on Capitol Hill for the NIAID director’s firing and a thorough investigation into the Wuhan lab-leak theory, which Fauci had tossed cold water on until late May. The appearance possessed some real Emperor Palpatine “I am the Senate” vibes, characterizing attacks on him as “attacks on science.”
“A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science because all of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning have been fundamentally based on science,” Fauci told the network’s Chuck Todd. “So if you are trying to get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you are attacking science.”
FAUCI: "A lot of what your seeing as attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science because all of the things I have spoken about from the very beginning have been fundamentally based on science." pic.twitter.com/O1oVkueEKR
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 9, 2021
In other words, Fauci himself is “science.” The arrogant, angry tenor of Fauci’s response speaks volumes about the NIAID director who, from the very beginning, capitalized on the Trump Resistance media to manipulate the press into coronating him the arbiter of COVID-19 while intimidating dissenters.
But now, Fauci owes the American people answers. In particular, he owes them to Fox News’ Bret Baier, who remains among the few Beltway journalists who would dare give Fauci a serious, hard-hitting interview.
In an email dated Apr. 17, 2020, Fauci appears to respond to a message from National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins under the subject line, “conspiracy gains momentum.” The entire exchange remains redacted except for a Mediaite link to a story on Baier’s reporting that U.S. intelligence sources were increasingly confident that the novel Wuhan coronavirus came from a Chinese lab.
An April 2020 email from NIH Director Francis Collins to Fauci under the subject line: Conspiracy gains momentum. The email included a link to an article about Brett Baier saying on FOX News that covid outbreak started in Wuhan lab. Fauci's response is redacted. pic.twitter.com/G8F7SUB23U
— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) June 1, 2021
Instead of sitting before friendly interviewers gushing over their appointed arbiter of science, Fauci owes it to the public to answer real questions from Baier on Fox News.
Why did Fauci dismiss the lab-leak theory for more than 14 months?
What was his response to Collins’ email identifying Baier’s reporting as a “conspiracy”?
Does Fauci, the long-time defender of gain-of-function research who wrote in 2012 it was worth risking a pandemic over, still think it’s a good idea to conduct lab research on viruses that makes them more infectious than they are in the wild? Does he still stand by his 2012 defense of such research?
Does he still think the U.S. should be funding research at overseas labs doing collaborative work with the Chinese military?
Does he regret lying to the public about masks?
What else did he lie about?
Does he regret lying about the possible origins of the virus?
On any given day, how much time did Fauci spend over the course of the pandemic doing media interviews, TV hits, magazine profiles, and book writing?
Does Fauci still trust China to allow for a genuine, transparent investigation of the Wuhan lab into COVID-19’s origin?
Does Fauci still trust the Chinese-dominated World Health Organizatio which botched its first origin probe?
Why did Fauci continue to defend the WHO even after it became clear it was acting in bad faith at the Chinese Communist Party’s behest?
If Fauci were a genuine public health official as opposed to a political hack, he would take questions from all major networks, not just the ones that promise to elevate his status.
