Dr. Anthony Fauci responded to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) unhinged attacks on him earlier Monday during a House subcommittee hearing, saying it’s behavior like hers—in which she refused to call him “doctor” and demanded he be imprisoned—that drives death threats.
On CNN’s The Source, Fauci told anchor Kaitlan Collins that Greene’s vitriolic antics were “really quite unfortunate.”
“The purpose of hearings is to try and figure out how we can do better so next time, if and when we are faced with a pandemic, we’d be better prepared and can benefit. If mistakes were made, we can identify them, and we try to correct them for the future,” said Fauci, who retired from government service at the end of 2022. “That’s not what we saw today,” he added, namechecking Greene.
Fauci, who in his testimony detailed some of the death threats he has received as a result of his work to combat COVID-19 in the Trump and Biden administrations, was asked by Collins if he had thought those threats would continue even after stepping down. Fauci implicated Greene for helping spur them.
“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,” he explained.
“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,” Fauci went on. “Those are the kind of things that drive up the death threats because there is a segment of the population out there that believe that kind of nonsense.”
