Dr. Anthony Fauci can feel confident that he won’t be outright fired by the Biden administration, if comments by President Biden and his White House press secretary on Friday are any indication.
“I’m very confident in Dr. Fauci,” Biden told reporters as he was leaving a press event on Friday.
White House Press Secretary also faced a handful of questions this week about Dr. Fauci after a portion of his emails were released to the public.
“Dr. Fauci is a renowned career civil servant. He’s overseen management of multiple global health crises, and attacks launched on him are certainly something we wouldn’t stand by,” she said on Friday.
“Can you imagine any circumstance where President Biden would ever fire him?” Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked.
“No,” Psaki replied.
On Thursday, after no questions from the press on the emails on Wednesday, the subject was finally broached with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
A reporter asked Psaki about the trove of revealing emails.
“And then going to the emails of Dr. Fauci, there was an exchange between Dr. Collins and Dr. Fauci referencing a Fox News report, discussing basically the lab leak as a conspiracy,” a reporter asked. “Collins denied, you know, jumping to conclusions and he asserted that his mention of conspiracies was referring to the thought, the rumor that the virus was engineered, bioengineered as a weapon. Is that the position of the administration and their top health experts, that this was not engineered? Or is that still an open question and part of this review?”
“Well, I think we’ve spoken to this pretty extensively from here,” Psaki said. “Let me just say, on Dr. Fauci and his emails, he has also spoken to this many, many times over the course of the last few days and we will let him speak for himself.”
Dr. Fauci has done a lot of “speaking for himself” during his damage-control tour in the media this week. He has grown increasingly defensive of the unproven hypothesis that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has natural origins.
Dr. Li-Meng Yan, however, a Chinese virologist who was among the first to suggest COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab, told Newsmax that Fauci’s emails contain “a lot of useful information” that suggest the doctor knows more than he is telling the public.
“They verify my work from the very beginning, even from last January, that these people know what happened, but they choose to hide for the Chinese Communist Party and for their own benefits,” Yan said.
“He knows all these things,” she said about the gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, which some international watchdogs fear could be weaponized by terrorist groups or totalitarian governments like China’s.
On Friday, a swelling number of Congressional members expressed their desire that Dr. Fauci appear before their committees to face fresh questions about his research.
“House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., who serves as the top Republican on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, and House Oversight Committee Ranking Member James Comer penned a letter to Democratic leaders on their committees demanding Fauci appear before their committees to testify on the origins of Covid-19,” Fox News reported.
“The emails contain new evidence regarding the origins of COVID-19, including the possibility it leaked from a U.S. taxpayer-funded laboratory,” they argued in the letter.
The lawmakers also insisted on seeing “unredacted versions of all of Dr. Fauci’s recently released emails.”
“Your continued inaction while facing mounting evidence of the CCP’s malicious conduct is concerning,” they added.
On Friday, Senator Josh Hawley called for Fauci to resign and a commission to be set up to investigate COVID-19’s origins.
“U.S. Senator Josh Hawley called for Dr. Fauci’s resignation following the release of his emails and recent investigative reporting regarding the origins of COVID-19,” the Hawley press office said in a release.
“Sen. Hawley also called for a full investigation into the origins of COVID-19, including determining the NIAID’s involvement in funding research at the Wuhan Institute for Virology,” the release added.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a vehement critic of the administration who has even formally called for Biden’s impeachment, demanded that Fauci be outright fired.
“We remain convinced that Dr. Fauci misled the American public regarding the origins, transmission, and mortality of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Greene argued in a letter shared with Washington Secrets. “Not only his private correspondence, but his ongoing contradictory advice on the use of masks, vaccines, and social distancing and isolation demonstrates either incompetence or deception.”
Senator Rand Paul, who has often proven Fauci’s most astute and persistent critics on Capitol Hill, has pressed Fauci on the stand about everything from “mask theater” to U.S. taxpayers funding risky coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
