Marco Rubio: Biden Must ‘Fire Dr. Fauci’ if He Actually Believes in Science

“It was a massive failure in judgment for a prominent public health official — though in retrospect unsurprising, given his history of holding back the truth based on personal judgments about when he thinks the American people are ‘ready’ to hear the facts,” Rubio wrote following the emergence of Fauci emails revealing how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director spoke about the virus and its origins behind the scenes.

“In most science-based jobs, that would be a fireable offense, but Fauci ran free without any accountability. Meanwhile, some of his peers who sought to raise questions about the possibility of a lab leak were silenced,” Rubio wrote, calling out Fauci for lying about dismissing the lab leak theory.

The Florida Republican also briefly referenced the report stemming from the Vanity Fair article detailing how “unelected bureaucrats” effectively obstructed Trump era efforts to investigate the origins of the Chinese coronavirus. According to the piece, investigators were “repeatedly advised not to open a ‘Pandora’s box.'” Meanwhile, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, “wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, ‘warned’ leaders within his bureau ‘not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19’ because it would ‘open a can of worms’ if it continued,'” as the outlet detailed.

Rubio also blasted Fauci’s denial of any role in “gain of function research”:

Dr. Fauci has now infamously denied that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded gain-of-function research at the WIV, but that was a lie by omission. In 2015, researchers at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the WIV teamed up to conduct a gain-of-function study funded largely by U.S. taxpayers. Only the Americans were funded by NIH, but the WIV received a sub-grant from USAID.

Notably, in one email, Fauci wrote, “Urgent, we must discuss this gain of function research,” yet he has continued to deny funding such research.

“Fauci is exploiting his position in government — and his ill-deserved positive reputation in the liberal media — to willfully misrepresent what is meant by a lab leak, conflating it with a biological weapons program (which is just one possible motive for gain-of-function research in Wuhan),” the Florida senator wrote, adding, “That, or he’s showing his age.”

Fauci, Rubio continued, has “repeatedly demonstrated a history of moving goal-posts when it comes to public health, withholding facts that don’t conform with his own narrative, and issuing inappropriate personal judgments that distort the truth.”