Dr. Anthony Fauci’s email inbox flooded with angry messages and threats in October about experiments on beagle dogs, according to The Washington Post.
- The emails were a result of “a viral and false claim that the agency Fauci leads, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had funded a medical experiment in which beagles were trapped in mesh cages filled with diseased sand flies,” The Washington Post reported, speaking with four National Institutes of Health officials.
More so, a bipartisan letter, which was signed by 24 members of Congress, questioned the NIAID’s research on dogs.
Fauci told The Washington Post that angry emails and threats have been a part of his job since he became a central figure of the pandemic.
- “The constant harassment in the form of ridiculous accusations and outright lies makes doing my job and that of my staff of fighting the covid-19 pandemic all the more difficult,” Fauci told The Washington Post. “This attack on me, which clearly has political overtones to a nonpolitical scientist, I feel, is dangerous to the entire field of science and (shows) how people try to intimidate scientists.”
Fauci told ”Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace in October that many see him as a controversial figure because he pushes “science, data and hard facts” rather than conspiracy theories.
- “I have stood for always making science, data and evidence be what we guide ourselves by,” Fauci said. “And I think people who feel differently, who have conspiracy theories, who deny reality, that’s looking them straight in the eye.”
But Fauci has already pointed to the COVID-19 endgame when his time in the spotlight will surely begin to dwindle. As I wrote for the Deseret News, Fauci said Tuesday that COVID-19 cases need to fall “well below 10,000” per day to reach normality.
- “I think if we can get well below 10,000, I think that would be a level that I think would be acceptable to us to get back to a degree of normality,” Fauci said, according to CNBC. “But again, I have to warn the listeners, these are not definitive statements — these are just estimates.”