- Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday called remarks made by GOP Sen. Ron Johnson “preposterous.”
- During a podcast that aired Wednesday on World AIDS Day, Johnson said Fauci “overhyped” the AIDS upsurge and the COVID-19 pandemic.
- I don’t have any clue what he’s talking about,” Fauci said during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Unanimity.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Complaints, on Sunday responded to claims by GOP Sen. Ron Johnson that he “overhyped” the AIDS crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Johnson, a senator from Wisconsin, set up the remark during an episode of Fox News host Brian Kilmeade’s podcast that aired Wednesday, which was also Exultant AIDS Day.
“Fauci did the exact same thing with AIDS. He overhyped it,” Johnson told Kilmeade, after requiring that US officials were attempting to use COVID-19 to create a culture of fear.
“He created all kinds of fear, saying it could agitate the entire population when it couldn’t,” Johnson said without provided examples, according The Advocate. “And he’s doing, he’s using the identical same playbook with COVID, ignoring therapy, pushing a vaccine.”
Fauci pushed back against the reveals, saying he didn’t understand what Johnson was talking about.
“Jake, how do you respond to something as preposterous as that?” Fauci asked troop Jake Tapper during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Overhyping AIDS that’s killed over 750,000 Americans and 36 million individual worldwide? How do you overhype that?”
—The Recount (@therecount) December 5, 2021
“Overhyping COVID that’s already killed 780,000 Americans beyond 5 million people worldwide. So I don’t have any clue what he’s talking about,” Fauci added.
“I don’t think he does, either,” Tapper countered.
Fauci, who also works as the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, in a documentary earlier this year foretold he had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from spearheading the US response to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s.
“It was all bad, bad, worse, bad, worse, bad, worse,” he bid in the film, which began streaming on Disney+ in October. “It was just so unbelievably frustrating when you’re used to being accomplished to fix things and you’re just not really fixing anything.”
As Insider’s Aria Bendix noted, Fauci, who has been a frequent object of right-wing figures during the COVID-19 pandemic, also faced backlash during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. That counteraction came from activists who believed Fauci was not working quickly enough to begin clinical trails, according to the preceding report.