Dr. Fauci shrugs off Fox News attacks during Maddow interview: 'It's all nonsense'
Dr. Tony Fauci on Friday addressed the latest rounds of attacks he has been receiving from conservatives during an interview on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show."
"The same Dr. Anthony Fauci who Axios tells us today is set to become the new Hillary," the host reported. '"Trump's new Hillary. The new villain-in-chief for former President Donald Trump, who apparently plans to make vilifying and attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci the centerpiece of his comeback political tour, which he wants to start tomorrow at a speech he's giving to the state Republican Party in North Carolina."
"Dr. Fauci is the subject — in a negative way — of every hour on Fox News prime time now, where they think he can somehow be blamed for causing covid or something, since he's the country's lead scientist on it. Or maybe he's a secret Chinese communist. I actually can't quite follow what it is they think Fauci has done so wrong," Maddow admitted.
"First of all, let me just ask if I'm being fair," Maddow said to Fauci. "Am I building you up to be thicker skinned about this than you are? Are you actually worried about this new sort of re-upping of attacks on you?"
"Well, I'm concerned about that more because it's really very much an attack on science, I think, Rachel," Fauci replied.
"My job was to make a vaccine and use my instituted and the talented scientists we have there and that we fund in the various universities to get a vaccine that was highly safe and highly effective and we succeeded," he explained. "That's what I do. All the other stuff is just a terrible, not-happy type of a distraction, but it's all nonsense."
He went on to discuss the debate over the coronavirus pandemic's origin.
"You know, there's this concern, is it a natural evolution, or is it something that happen out of a lab, an accident, or what have you. It is important to understand that. But it is being approached now in a very vehement way, in a very distorted way, I believe, by attacking me," he said.
"I think the question is extremely legitimate, you should want to know how this happened so that we can make sure it doesn't happen again," he noted. "But what's happened in the middle of all of that, I've become the object of extraordinary, I believe, completely inappropriate, distorted, misleading and misrepresented attacks."
"Which, you know, it is what it is, but it's happening, and that's unfortunate," Fauci said.
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