Dr. Anthony Fauci said behavior like that of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and other conservative figures is the reason he continues to receive death threats more than a year after stepping down from public service.
The nation’s former top infectious disease expert spoke to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Monday after he testified at a contentious congressional hearing on the origins of COVID-19.
Greene, a vaccine conspiracy theorist, sparked fireworks at the hearing with her antics, including by refusing to call Fauci “doctor” and calling for him to be prosecuted for “crimes against humanity.”
Fauci said incidents like this one typically cause a spike in violent threats against him.
“It’s a pattern, Kaitlan, that whenever somebody gets up — whether it’s news media, 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 said.
“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,” he added.
Earlier in the interview, he suggested the hostility at Monday’s hearing was not productive, pointing out that he had “testified literally hundreds of times” before Congress during his nearly 40 years as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
He said the vitriol that played out in the hearing “was really quite unfortunate, because the purpose of hearings are to try and figure out how we can do better so that next time, if and when we are faced with a pandemic, we’d be better prepared and we could benefit, if mistakes were made, we identify them, and we try to correct them for the future.”
“That’s not what we saw today, as shown by the clip you showed with Marjorie Taylor Greene,” he added. “I mean, that was nothing about trying to do better, unfortunately.”
Until his departure from public office in 2022, Fauci was the lead advisor to the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.