TJV NEWS.COM with AP elements — Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious diseases expert, attacked Sen. Ted Cruz for suggesting that Fauci be investigated for statements he made about COVID-19 and said the criticism by the Texas Republican was an attack on “science”.
Fauci has repeated a mantra on national television, that any questioning of him is an “attack on science”, declaring himself the only “real science”.
Fauci quickly deflected on CBS Network by mentioning the completely unconnected January 6th riots at the capitol.
“I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?”, in response to Cruz. Fauci, who is President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, said in an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“I’m just going to do my job and I’m going to be saving lives, and they’re going to be lying,” Fauci said.
Some Republicans, including Cruz and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., have accused Fauci of lying to Congress when he denied in May that the National Institutes of Health-funded “gain of function” research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world — at a virology lab in Wuhan, China.
Cruz has urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Fauci’s statements.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called the GOP criticism nonsense.
“Anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this,” he said.
Cruz and Paul say an October letter from NIH to Congress contradicts Fauci.
National Institutes of Health Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak informed a leading House Republican lawmaker on Wednesday, October 20th,2021 that the agency funded gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses in China after over a year of denials from the agency’s leadership.
Tabak said that its grantee, EcoHealth Alliance, first notified the NIH in August that it conducted the gain-of-function experiments with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China between June 2018 and May 2019.
NIH has repeatedly maintained that its funding did not go to such research involving boosting the infectivity and lethality of a pathogen.
When tossed a softball pre-arranged question in the CBS interview whether Republicans might be raising the claims to make him a scapegoat and deflect criticism of Trump, Fauci said, “of course, you have to be asleep not to figure that one out.”
