Fauci calls on Fox News to fire host
NEW YORK — Fox News defended Jesse Watters on Tuesday after he used the phrase “kill shot” in a speech urging young conservatives to confront Dr. Anthony Fauci in public with a hostile interview.
Fauci, asked about it on CNN, said that Watters should be fired “on the spot” but predicted he wouldn’t be held accountable for his language.
Fox said Watters’ words had been “twisted completely out of context.”
Watters, a host on Fox News Channel’s panel show “The Five” who made his initial mark doing aggressive interviews for Bill O’Reilly, spoke Monday to a group of college and high school conservatives. His audience booed at the mention of Fauci’s name.
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the government’s most visible spokesman on the COVID-19 pandemic, has been the subject of frequent criticism by some Fox News commentators who have been seeking to appeal to audience members resistant to vaccinations.
Watters said that Fauci should be confronted on the subject of whether the National Institute of Health funded research at a lab in Wuhan, China, the city where the COVID-19 virus originated. He said an interviewer should suggest he lied about the topic — something Fauci has disputed.
“Now you go in for the kill shot, the kill shot with an ambush, deadly, beme cause he doesn’t see it coming,” Watters said.
He suggested an interviewer say, “‘You know why people don’t trust you, don’t you?’ Oh, he is dead. He’s dead. He’s done.”
The interviewer should make sure the encounter is filmed and the footage given to conservative media, Watters said. It’s a confrontation technique that has been used elsewhere in conservative politics by the group Project Veritas.
Fauci noted that for two years, he’s been encouraging people to protect themselves against COVID-19 by practicing good public health practices and get vaccinated.
“For that, you have some guy out there saying people should be giving a kill shot, to ambush me?” he said. “I mean, what kind of craziness is there in society these days? That’s awful what he said. And he’s going to go, very likely, unaccountable. Whatever network he is on is not going to do anything. The guy should be fired on the spot.”
Fauci, in a “60 Minutes” interview in October, discussed death threats he had received and his need for a security detail.
Last month on Fox, Tucker Carlson compared Fauci to Italian World War II dictator Benito Mussolini, while Lara Logan said Fauci, to some people, represented Josef Mengele, the Nazi death doctor.