Dr. Anthony Fauci's assistant quit answering the phone for two weeks after an animal-rights group pushed false claims about his research and two dozen lawmakers literally signed on to the attacks.
The chief medical adviser for President Joe Biden on COVID-19 received 3,600 angry phone calls in 36 hours last month, as he and other administration officials were rolling out a campaign to vaccinate younger children, after the White Coat Waste Project whipped up conservative outrage against him, reported the Washington Post.
"You worthless piece of sh*t, you should be put in prison," said a caller in one of the 15 voice mail messages the newspaper obtained. "Torturing animals! I'd like to take you out in the sand, tie you down, put them fleas all over your ass."
The animal rights group promoted the false claim that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci heads, had funded a medical experiment that trapped beagles in cages filled with diseased sand flies, and 24 bipartisan members of Congress signed a letter questioning the agency's funding of medical research on dogs.
"The constant harassment in the form of ridiculous accusations and outright lies makes doing my job and that of my staff of fighting the covid-19 pandemic all the more difficult," Fauci told the Post. "This attack on me, which clearly has political overtones to a nonpolitical scientist, I feel, is dangerous to the entire field of science and [shows] how people try to intimidate scientists."
The false claim originated after researchers in Tunisia, where the research was conducted, mistakenly listed NIAID as a funder in a scientific journal published in July, and the publication issued an Oct. 26 correction, the newspaper reported, but the bogus claim had been shared or responded to 375,000 times in give days by Oct. 28 and Donald Trump Jr. was selling "Fauci Kills Puppies" T-shirts and hoodies.
"He's been turned into this supervillain, a caricature of a mad scientist cooking up experiments to torture puppies, and it's kind of mind-bending," said Jeff Yang, a research director at the Institute for the Future, which monitors online activity. "The Fauci-puppies meme has become a phenomenon."
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