Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci contradicted several of his past statements from the COVID-19 pandemic when he testified before Congress on Monday.
The former top pandemic adviser to two presidential administrations, who retired from NIAID in 2022 after nearly four decades at the head of NIAID, faced sharp questions about the reversals from Republican members of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
“Americans were aggressively bullied, shamed, and silenced for merely questioning or debating issues such as social distancing, masks, vaccines, or the origins of COVID,” Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said in his opening remarks to Fauci, 83.
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Six feet of separation
- “Anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this,” Fauci said in a Nov. 28, 2021, interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” “So if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about. But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people could recognize there’s a person there. There’s a face, there’s a voice you can recognize, you see him on television. So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”
- “It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall,” Fauci said in a January congressional interview of the social distancing mandateimposed on federal agencies, businesses and schools. “Just an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data or even data that could be accomplished.”
- “When I say it was not based in science, I meant a prospective clinical trial to determine whether six-foot was better than three [or] was better than 10,” Fauci said Monday during his testimony, adding that it was a “CDC decision.”
- “We had discussions in the White House about that,” he acknowledged when asked why the mandate wasn’t changed. “But the CDC’s decision, it was their decision to make and they made it.”
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Masking is necessary — even for children as young as five years old
- In March 2020, Fauci said in a “60 Minutes” interview, “Wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection.”
- Fauci went on to flip to support masking, even calling for it to be imposed on schoolchildren as an “extra step of caution” in a July 2021 interview on “CBS This Morning.”
- “All of that is in the context of, at the time, 4,000-5,000 people a day were dying,” Fauci said in Monday’s hearing before admitting: “There was no study that did masks on kids.”
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Covid vaccine opposition is ‘ideological bullsh–t’
- “It’s been proven that when you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their ideological bulls–t and they get vaccinated,” Fauci said in an October 2020 audiobook recording of his biography, “Fauci” written by New Yorker journalist Michael Specter.
- On Monday, Fauci said “that’s not what I was referring to” and the objections to COVID vaccines “were not,” in fact, “ideological bulls–t.”
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Lab leak proponents are promoting a ‘conspiracy theory’
- “Not on my part,” Fauci said when asked whether he participated in efforts by federal public health and White House officials to downplay and put pressure on big tech companies to censor proponents of the lab leak theory.
- “But look at the facts. I’ve kept an open mind throughout the entire process,” Fauci also said.
- Then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins in an October 2020 email to Fauci called for a “quick and devastating” takedown of leading epidemiologists — including Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — who authored the Great Barrington Declaration in opposition to COVID lockdowns and other mitigation measures.
- Fauci and Collins also participated in efforts to produce a controversial research study, titled “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,” that was pushed to debunk the lab leak theory.
- “I’ve heard these conspiracy theories,” Fauci said in a February 2020 podcast appearance of concerns raised about the Chinese military’s ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was later confirmed by a US intelligence assessment. “They’re just conspiracy theories.”
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Vaccines are ‘a dead end’ to COVID
- “When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family, but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community,” Fauci said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation in May 2021. “In other words, you become a dead end to the virus.”
- Asked Monday, the former NIAID chief answered: “Vaccines save lives. It is very, very clear that vaccines have saved hundreds of thousands of Americans. … In the beginning, it clearly prevented infection in a certain percentage of people, but the durability of its ability to prevent infection was not long, it was measured in months.”
- “It did not,” he added, “prevent transmission when the ability to prevent infection waned.”
