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Fauci says he has saved ‘millions,’ reacts to DeSantis saying ‘chuck that little elf across the Potomac’

September 24, 2023 | | Print Article

Dr. Anthony Fauci hadn’t lost a step since his retirement, picking up where he left off with panic porn-peddling as he boasted of saving “literally, millions of lives” and reacted to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “little elf” remark.

“…he’s triggering in people who are bad…”

(Video: MSNBC)

The figurehead of The Scienceâ„¢, perhaps more fork-tongued than the serpent represented on the symbol for medicine, made a show of defending his record Thursday when he appeared alongside Mehdi Hasan on MSNBC.

Near the end of the lengthy interview, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) spoke to threats that he had experienced that required him to have security and conflated those of violence with calls for accountability.

“What happens is that if you become the symbol of — the object of people’s anger, even people who know nothing about you, know the fact that in my career I have been involved in saving, literally, millions of lives that people — hello! You know, forget that…I become that symbol and then, when they say something like that, you get somebody who doesn’t know anything at all about me, who’s crazy, says, ‘Wow, I’m gonna go get that person,’ or ‘That person should be killed’ or ‘That person should be prosecuted.’ And that’s the reason why I have to have security,” argued Fauci.

“Governor DeSantis doesn’t personally want to hurt me but he’s triggering in people who are bad and really want to hurt people, that’s the problem,” he continued.

“It’s a complicated issue, but I have become, by people who know nothing about me, who don’t investigate what I’ve said…I’ve become the symbol of what the far-right extremists feel that I’m the one that had to — in an uncomfortable way, I wasn’t pleased with that, I wasn’t happy to do it — that I had to publicly disagree with the president of the United States,” rambled Fauci in response to a clip of DeSantis. “That was very painful for me because I have a great deal of respect for the presidency of the United States.”

The snippet of America’s Governor featured him speaking at a “Keep Florida Free” event in August 2022 where he had called out Fauci over claims that lockdowns hadn’t caused “any permanent damage to any young kids.”

“I’m just sick of seeing him,” DeSantis exclaimed. “I know he says he’s going to retire. Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.”

Fauci, for whom records recently showed a job in net wealth from around $7.6 million to over $11 million from 2019 to his 2022 retirement, attempted to defend his positions and told Hasan, “But I felt, in order to just maintain my own personal and professional integrity, and my responsibility to the American public, I had to say it like it was and I had to do it publicly.”

The formerly highest paid individual in the federal government outright disregarded misleading and downright damaging statements that promoted lockdowns, masking and experimental injections as “ideological” differences and said, “That triggered a degree of negativity towards me on the part of the far-right that all of a sudden when you have anger — in some cases maybe justifiable anger of one ideological group against the other — you need a symbol like somebody has gotta be the object of the anger.”

At one point, Fauci also took a page out of former President Bill Clinton’s playbook on parsing definitions as he aimed to “clarify” his past statements about funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology by arguing over what the books officially referred to as gain of function research. A similar tactic had been used in an update on the definition of “vaccine” to justify the promoted narrative on the COVID jabs that neither prevented transmission of the virus nor protected against symptoms.

Social media was not as willing as the MSNBC host to let Fauci’s claims go by unchecked as users introduced claims of their own.

Kevin Haggerty
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