Republican Senators Ted Cruz (TX) and Rand Paul (KY) took Dr. Anthony Fauci to task after he claimed criticism of him is “dangerous” during a Sunday talk show.
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical advisor to the president, took shots at Cruz and Paul during an interview with CBS News’ “Face The Nation.”
“Anybody who spins lies and threatens and all that theater that goes on with some of the investigations and the congressional committees and the Rand Pauls and all that other nonsense, that’s noise, Margaret, that’s noise,” Fauci host Margaret Brennan.
“Anybody who’s looking at this carefully, realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this, 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 can recognize that there’s a person there, so it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science,” Fauci added.
The Kentucky Senator responded in a tweet:
“The absolute hubris of someone claiming THEY represent science. It’s astounding and alarming that a public health bureaucrat would even think to claim such a thing, especially one who has worked so hard to ignore the science of natural immunity,” Paul tweeted.
When Fauci was asked about Cruz calling for him to be prosecuted by the Department of Justice, Fauci responded: “Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?”
Cruz responded in a Twitter thread, slamming Fauci as “an unelected technocrat who has distorted science and facts in order to exercise authoritarian control over millions of Americans.”
“He lives in a liberal world where his smug ‘I REPRESENT science’ attitude is praised,” Cruz said.
The Texas Senator pointed out four “facts” against Fauci:
(1) On May 11, Fauci testified before a Senate Committee that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
(2) On October 20, NIH wrote they funded an experiment at the Wuhan lab testing if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.” That is gain of function research.
(3) Fauci’s statement and the NIH’s October 20 letter cannot both be true. The statements are directly contradictory.
(4) 18 USC 1001 makes it felony, punishable by up to 5 years in prison, to lie to Congress.
Cruz doubled down on his call for the DOJ to prosecute Fauci: “No amount of ad hominem insults parroting Democrat talking points will get Fauci out of this contradiction.”