Fauci’s rebuttal spurs more digs from Cruz
WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz is escalating his brewing feud with Dr. Anthony Fauci, who the Texas Republican called “the most dangerous bureaucrat in the history of the country.”
“I don’t think anyone has hurt science, has hurt the credibility of the CDC, has hurt the credibility of doctors, more than Dr. Fauci, because throughout this pandemic, he’s been dishonest,” Cruz said. “He’s been political. He’s been partisan, and the American people know it.”
The latest dig comes after Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, brought up the Jan. 6 insurrection when asked to respond to calls from Cruz and other Republicans for Fauci to be investigated for statements about COVID-19.
“I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?” Fauci, the government’s top infectious diseases expert, said in an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Cruz led an effort in the Senate to delay certifying Trump’s loss in the 2020 election and objected to Arizona’s electoral votes less than an hour before demonstrators breached the building.
Cruz shot back on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Monday night, focusing especially on Fauci’s assertion that GOP criticism of him really amounts to a criticism of science, because “I represent science.”
“It’s like Louis XIV, the Sun King in France saying ‘L’État, c’est moi,’ ‘I am the state’ — it is this delusion of grandeur that you cannot criticize him,” Cruz said.
Throughout the pandemic, Fauci has been a target for Cruz and other Republicans who have questioned his advice and called him out for contradicting himself during the coronavirus outbreak.
Most recently, GOP lawmakers have accused Fauci of lying to Congress when he denied that the National
Institutes of Health funded research on viruses at a lab in Wuhan, China. They say an October letter from NIH to Congress contradicts Fauci, but the NIH has repeatedly maintained that its funding did not go to research involving boosting the transmissibility and lethality of a pathogen, according to the Associated Press.
Cruz, who called for Fauci to be fired earlier this year, has also called for Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate his statements.
Fauci, in his CBS interview, brushed off such accusations as political theater.
“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.