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.
“You took the position that you presented ‘the science’ and your words came across as final and as infallible in matters pertaining to the pandemic,” the chairman added before he and other Republican panel members recounted those statements.
AP
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 mandate imposed 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.”
