After Anthony Fauci appeared at a contentious US House hearing on Monday, the former top public health official who led the nation’s response to Covid-19 singled out the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and Fox News as drivers of the “credible death threats” that he described to lawmakers.
“Whether it’s … news media – you know Fox News does it a lot – or it’s somebody in the Congress who gets up and makes a public statement that … the deaths of X number of people [were] because of policies or some crazy idea that I created, immediately, it’s like clockwork: the death threats go way up,” Fauci said in an interview with CNN.
The ex-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases then alluded to how Georgia’s conspiracy theorist Republican congresswoman assailed him during his testimony on Monday, telling the CNN host Kaitlan Collins: “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.”
Fauci had earlier told a subcommittee of the US House’s oversight and accountability committee that he, his wife and three daughters had been harassed via emails, texts and mailed letters for his role in recommending activity restrictions aimed at halting the spread of Covid-19, especially at the height of the pandemic in the spring of 2020.
Two people had been arrested in connection with “credible death threats”, said Fauci, who described needing round-the-clock security protection for him and his family. And the harassment continued until the present day despite his retirement in 2022.
“Someone … clearly was on their way to kill me,” Fauci added during his testimony. “It is very troublesome to me. It is much more trouble because they’ve involved my wife and my three daughters at these moments.”
Fauci’s remarks about Taylor Greene in his CNN interview apparently stemmed from her suggestions at Monday’s hearing that his masking and social distancing recommendations toward the beginning of the pandemic were abusive to the public.
“Do the American people deserve to be abused like that, Mr Fauci? Because you’re not Dr, you’re Mr, Fauci,” Taylor Greene said at one point on Monday.
She later told reporters that Fauci belonged in prison “and should be tried for mass murder and crimes against humanity” over his attempts to limit the number of Covid-19 deaths in the US, which exceeded 350,000 in 2020.
Taylor Greene on Tuesday then wrote on X that the death threats cited by Fauci were his own fault, accusing him of “tyrannical policies”.
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Meanwhile, in only one instance which illustrates the contempt that conservatives generally held against Fauci during the pandemic, a Fox News commentator sparked outrage in the fall of 2021 by comparing him to the Nazi physician Josef Mengele, who experimented on Jewish people imprisoned in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
Not every lawmaker Fauci faced on Monday was hostile to him. California’s Democratic representative Robert Garcia apologized to Fauci about the treatment the doctor endured from Taylor Greene and other Republicans, calling her “a national embarrassment” and him “an American hero”.