Marsha Blackburn Fact Checks Fauci After He Claims Attacks on Him Are ‘Attacks on Science’

Blackburn
AP Photo/Mark Humphrey
Hannah Knudsen

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) responded Wednesday to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s appearance on MSNBC after he dismissed her critiques of him — stating particularly that he was in cahoots with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg, working to cherry-pick information to shape a particular coronavirus narrative.

“Dr. Fauci should have learned in science class that you need evidence to support a claim,” Blackburn said following the White House medical adviser’s discussion with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd.

“Fauci was once again evasive and dishonest. Rather than conduct a serious interview, Chuck Todd downplayed the concerns of the American people. We have had enough of that from the media over the past 15 months. I stand by my tweet,” she added.

During the appearance, Todd played a clip from Blackburn’s video on Wednesday, in which she detailed the emails between Fauci and Zuckerberg during the pandemic:

“Dr. Fauci was emailing Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook trying to create that narrative, cherry-picking information so that you would only know what they wanted you to know, and there would be a narrative that would fit with this cherry-picked information,” she said in the video, which Todd played before Fauci. She also noted that Fauci and his agency wrote the check to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to do coronavirus research.

“I don’t even know where to begin, but it’s a sitting United States senator,” a flabbergasted Todd said after playing the clip, describing Blackburn’s remarks as one of the most “extreme” versions of what he has heard.

“How do you debunk something like that? She’s got it in her own head, again, a United States senator that represents the state of Tennessee. What do you say to that?” he asked.

Fauci claimed ignorance.

“I don’t have a clue of what she just said. I don’t have a clue of what she’s talking about,” Fauci said, as Todd chimed in, “Neither did we.”

“I mean, so welcome to the club. I have no idea what she’s talking about. And I’m sorry. I don’t want to be pejorative against a United States senator, but I have no idea what she’s talking about,” Fauci said, calling her points “so ridiculous” and claiming that each and every one could be easily debunked, though he largely failed to do so.

Rather than addressing his correspondence with Zuckerberg, which has been well-documented, he defended his flip flop on wearing masks, claiming his initial dismissal was warranted because there was thought to be a shortage of masks. He also said there was no evidence that they worked outside the context of a hospital and added they were not aware of the extent of asymptomatic spread.

“It wasn’t only me” who made those suggestions, Fauci continued, claiming he has only changed his mind based on the data.

Fauci added that it is, in his view, “very dangerous” to discredit public health officials and asserted that attacks on him are “quite frankly, attacks on science.”

“Science and the truth are being attacked,” he said.

However, as Blackburn noted, emails between Fauci and Mark Zuckerberg “prove how they worked to craft a narrative and cherry-pick specific information to fit their agenda,” as Breitbart News detailed:

Indeed, the Fauci emails reveal the correspondence between Fauci and the Big Tech CEO, with Zuckerberg thanking Fauci for his “leadership” and flagging him on the social media platform’s rollout of its coronavirus information hub to promote what he described as “authoritative information from reliable sources” — sources deemed “reliable” by the social media giant, of course.

“As a central part of this hub, I think it would be useful to include a video from you because people trust and want to hear from our experts rather than just a bunch of agencies and political leaders,” Zuckerberg continued.

Fauci responded, calling the proposal “terrific,” emphasizing the importance of reaching “as many people as possible” and convincing them to “take mitigation strategies seriously”:

https://twitter.com/kerpen/status/1399940172481978369

Additionally, Facebook did, in fact, censor certain content on the origins of the Chinese coronavirus:

A new report from the Republican side of the House Intelligence Committee appears to refute Facebook “fact-checkers” who halted dissemination of a February 2020 New York Post column evaluating the proposition that the source of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic was a leak from a virology laboratory in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China.

The social media giant slapped a “False Information” notification over shares of the February 22, 2020 take from Steven Mosher – the president of the Population Research Institute and a vocal China critic – while the Post Editorial Board at the time remarked that the link was “opinion” not straight news reportage to begin with.

Finally, under Fauci’s directive, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases sent nearly $1 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, documents from the Department of Health and Human Services show.

The questions do not end there, though. Blackburn also believes it is past due time for Fauci to explain why he “downplayed the idea that COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab”:

“Why has the investigation of COVID’s origins been delayed? Ask Fauci,” she added on Thursday:

Blackburn will lead a press conference on this subject, Big Tech’s suppression of information on the origins of the Chinese coronavirus, on Thursday:

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