It’s a Despot Situation

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Fauci: “To criticize me is to criticize science” Read this transcript to get the full measure of the man.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Two Washington Post reporters said that back in July of 2020, you had been speaking to your wife about resigning.

DR. FAUCI: I never spoke to my wife, ever about resigning. They got that wrong. I never even considered for a moment of resigning.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Never considered it for a moment?

DR. FAUCI: Not even for a second.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Dr. Birx told us she thought about it almost daily, ultimately didn't but-

DR. FAUCI: Dr. Birx is Dr. Birx and Tony Fauci is Tony Fauci.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Why do you feel so strongly about that, about staying on the job when you become, I mean, you were personally not just rhetorically threatened, your security, your safety, your family? How did you deal with that?

DR. FAUCI: I dealt with it by focusing on what my job is from the time that I went into medicine to right now, where I am at my age, my job has been totally focused on doing what I can with the talents and the influence I had to make scientific advances to protect the health of the American public. So anybody who spins lies and threatens and all that theater that goes on with some of the investigations and the congressional committees and the Rand Pauls and all that other nonsense, that's noise, Margaret, that's noise. I know what my job is.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Senator Cruz told the attorney general you should be prosecuted.

DR. FAUCI: Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?

MARGARET BRENNAN: Do you think that this is about making you a scapegoat to deflect--

DR. FAUCI: Of course-

MARGARET BRENNAN: --From President Trump?

DR. FAUCI: Of course, you have to be asleep not to figure that one out.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, there are a lot of Republican senators taking aim at this. I mean--

DR. FAUCI: That's OK, I'm just going to do my job and I'm going to be saving lives and they're going to be lying.

MARGARET BRENNAN: It just, it seems, another layer of danger to play politics around matters of life and death.

DR. FAUCI: Right, exactly. Exactly. And to me, that's- that's unbelievably bad because all I want to do is save people's lives. That's what I have done for the last 50 years, 40 of which was 37 of which was leading the institute.

When I see people who scattered around misinformation and lies that can actually endanger the lives of people, but also it is very easy to pick out an individual and make them a target because that's what people can focus on. But you're talking about systems, you're talking about the CDC, you're talking about the FDA, you're talking about science in general.

Anybody who's looking at this carefully realizes that there's a distinct anti-science flavor to this. So if they get up and criticize science, nobody's going to know what they're talking about. But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people could recognize there's a person there. There's a face, there's a voice you can recognize, you see him on television. So it's easy to criticize, but they're really criticizing science because I represent science. That's dangerous.

To me, that's more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me. I'm not going to be around here forever, but science is going to be here forever. And if you damage science, you are doing something very detrimental to society long after I leave. And that's what I worry about.