Florida Gov Ron DeSantis has promised to hold Dr Anthony Fauci’s feet to the fire if he reaches the White House next year.
DeSantis, who is polling a distant 12 percent among Republican voters behind third-time Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s 60 percent, became a household name during the throes of the Covid pandemic when he vowed to save his state from what he called a ‘Faucian dystopia.’
He told his 2.2 million followers on X, formerly Twitter: ‘I am the only candidate who will bring a reckoning for what tyrants like Fauci did to our country during COVID.’
The governor’s statement came in the aftermath of Dr Fauci’s disastrous 14-hour meeting before a House coronavirus subcommittee, during which he is said to have failed to answer hundreds of questions and muddied the US’ and his personal roles in funding risky research on viruses.
Gov DeSantis, though not leading in the latest polls, intends to hold Dr Fauci’s feet to the fire over deleterious covid policies if he gains office
New details about Dr Fauci’s closed-door testimony showed that the former top White House advisor failed to properly oversee federal funding for risky research and did not devise lockdown policies informed by data
Gov DeSantis added: ‘We cannot allow Anthony Fauci to escape accountability.’
The Florida Republican is far from the first politico to paint Dr Fauci’s role in the pandemic response as tyrannical.
Kentucky conservative Sen Rand Paul and Former Senate candidate Mehmet Oz both called him a ‘petty tyrant.’ Both are and were limited in what they could do to hold Dr Fauci accountable for his perceived failures.
But DeSantis’ high profile as an alternative to the embattled Trump for the 2024 ticket lends considerably more credibility to his pledge to put Dr Fauci through a ‘reckoning.’
Dr Fauci, once deemed America’s top infectious disease doctor and sober voice in the room during the chaotic early months of the Covid pandemic, has seen a precipitous decline in popularity since then as the catastrophic effects of Covid-era lockdown policies have continued to play out.
Among all voters, public opinion of him dropped from 68 percent in December 2020 down to 53 percent by April 2022.
Among the most notable effects of lockdown policies Dr Fauci endorsed is the plummeting mental health of America’s children, forced in 2020 and 2021 to forego social time with friends, after-school activities and sports, and attending classes in person.
Lockdowns and quarantine recommendations have also led to rapid surges in diseases that could have been prevented if people had not lost access to necessary preventative healthcare services during that time, including mammograms, prostate exams, and regular checkups with a primary care physician.
Fauci just wrapped up two days – 14 hours in total – of marathon testimony about his role in devising policies to combat the spread of the virus, issuing vaccine mandates for universities and schools, and overseeing federal dollars being spent on risky ‘gain of function’ research that sees scientists tinker with viruses in ways that make them more transmissible and/or deadly.
The mountain of testimony was informative though ‘frustrating’ for Republicans on the committee, including Ohio Rep Brad Wenstrup, who told reporters after Monday’s session that ‘there may be over a hundred or so “I do not recall” or “I do not remember” answers’ so far.
After the first day of questioning wrapped up, Republicans said that Fauci backtracked on his earlier insistence that the US did not fund gain of function research.
They also noted that Dr Fauci approved federal funding for dubious research proposals without reading them fully, despite overseeing the approval of $3 million in NIH grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists conduct such research.
On day two, lawmakers homed in on Fauci-endorsed lockdown and social distancing policies.
The former White House medical advisor said scientific data was not a driver of the blanket six-feet-distance recommendation to reduce the spread of the virus, saying that the rule ‘just sort of appeared.’
He also said that vaccine mandates, which split the nation in 2021, likely reinforced a general sense of distrust in the government with more and more people questioning its motives.
The issue of devastating downstream effects of mandatory vaccines, school, and business closures has become a rallying cry for Republicans like Gov DeSantis who, in addition to attributing most if not all pandemic policy failures on Dr Fauci, have gone in the complete opposite direction.
For example, Gov DeSantis appointed Dr Joseph Ladapo, a vaccine skeptic, to the state’s surgeon general position in 2021 at the same time that the federal government, many private corporations, and school districts were initiating plans to require Covid vaccines.
Railing against Dr Fauci has become a major facet of Gov DeSantis’ political cache.
He has been able to tap into Republican voters’ disgust at dangerous Covid policies and come up with an extremely alluring message – that Dr Fauci will not get away with it under his watch.
