Outgoing National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Alex Wagner Tonight” that people on the right who denied President Joe Biden’s 2020 win or attacked him were a “danger to democracy.”
Wagner said, “It seems like these dark forces of racism and antisemitism and anti-vax, and arch-conservative ideology are folding on to themselves around this COVID issue. This past weekend, Beverly Hills police in California had to look into antisemitic flyers that were distributed around Beverly Hills, listing CDC officials who have Jewish last names saying every single aspect of the COVID agenda is Jewish. That worries me as an American citizen. That worries me as someone who believes in the work you have been doing and sees it as essential to public health. Does it worry you?”
Fauci said, “I think you have a very important point there, Alex. That has worried me much, much more so, and then personal attacks on me. It is the things you brought out there, the complete denial of reality, the normalization of untruths, where there is so much lying going on over there that people accept it as being part of the norm. I think if anybody looks at history and finds out and examines when you distort reality and keep lying over and over again, after a while, you get a lot of people believing it. That is the beginning, I believe, of the destruction of our democracy. So, it is less an attack on me or my Jewish colleagues at the CDC that they are attacking. It is really, in my mind, an affront on our democracy. It is the same mindset that says the president didn’t win the election, even though every single examination proved that he did. When they say that January 6 did not exist and was a friendly visit to the gift shop at the Capitol, that kind of mentality to me is a danger to democracy.”
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