‘The guy should be fired on the spot’: Dr. Fauci fires back at 'kill shot' comment from Fox News host
America's top infectious disease expert on Tuesday said that Fox News should have already fired host Jesse Watters for his recent comments.
CNN's John Berman interviewed Dr. Tony Fauci ahead of President Joe Biden's address to the nation on the Omicron variant.
"On the subject of divisiveness — and I'm not going to play it because, frankly, I think it's dangerous," Berman said. "But Jesse Watters, who is a Fox News entertainer, was giving a speech to a conservative group where he talked about you, suggesting to the crowd they ambush you with what he said was some kind of rhetorical 'kill shot.' That was his exact word."
Speaking at a Turning Point USA conference this week, Watters told the attendees: "You got to ambush a guy like Fauci. OK, this is how you do these ambushes like O'Keefe. You got to be respectful because they'll turn the tables on you and you can't have it blow up in your face. So if you see Fauci out and about and you know he's coming to town, this is how you approach... The first question can't be a yes or no question because his answer can just be yes or no. You got to elicit. It has to be a how or why. So what you do with Anthony Fauci is, you say Dr. Fauci, why did you lie? OK? Why did you lie? I love that question."
"Now you go in for the kill shot," Watters added moments later. "The kill shot with an ambush, deadly, because he doesn't see it coming. This is when you say. Dr. Fauci, you funded risky research at a sloppy Chinese lab, the same lab that sprung this pandemic on the world. You know why people don't trust you, don't you? Oh, he is dead. He's dead. He's done. Now you do that in 30 seconds. So you need 30 seconds. Now you get that footage to us. You get it to Fox."
"I'm wondering, you know, how much that concerns you when you hear language like that about you and your well-being," Berman said Tuesday.
"Well, John, that's horrible," Fauci replied.
"I mean, that just is such a reflection of the craziness that goes on in society," he continued. "The only thing that I have ever done throughout these two years is to encourage people to practice good public health practices, to get vaccinated, to be careful in public settings, to wear a mask. And for that, you have some guy out there saying that people should be giving me a kill shot, to ambush me?"
"I mean, what kind of craziness is there in society these days? That's awful that he said that," Fauci said.
"And he's going to go, very likely, unaccountable," Fauci said. "That's crazy — the guy should be fired on the spot."
Fox News defended their employee in a statement: "Based on watching the full clip and reading the entire transcript, it’s more than clear that Jesse Watters was using a metaphor for asking hard-hitting questions to Dr. Fauci about gain-of-function research and his words have been twisted completely out of context.”
Watch:
(Note: This article has been updated for clarity.)
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