WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony Fauci said he didn’t call Sen. Roger Marshall a “moron” during a January congressional hearing — at least not directly.
“I didn’t directly say that to him, I mumbled something to myself under my breath,” said Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser. “That’s a little bit different than publicly calling someone something. That wasn’t meant to be heard.”
The comment came in the middle of a tense exchange during the a hearing held by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
When it came time for Marshall to question Fauci, he produced a poster that showed Fauci’s salary, which is set by the government, and implied that Fauci was earning money off of pharmaceutical companies.
“Why would you infer publicly at a hearing on television that I was in bed with the pharmaceutical companies when the fact is I have never taken a single cent from the pharmaceutical company?” Fauci said on a call with the National Press Foundation Tuesday.
Fauci’s financial disclosure form for 2020, obtained through a public records request, showed that he did not receive money from pharmaceutical companies. In a June committee hearing, Fauci said his lab received royalties from 2015 to 2020 — which are not required by law to be reported on a financial disclosure forms — for developing a monoclonal antibody that was not used on patients. He said his royalties averaged $191.46 per year in that time.
He said Marshall’s comments were “a direct, unprovoked impugning of my integrity, which I resented and responded accordingly.”
Marshall’s office repeated their inaccurate claim that Fauci lied because the records were not available with a simple Google search, a misrepresentation of how the federal Freedom of Information Act process works.
“It’s prideful bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci that have gone decades unquestioned by a ballooning federal government, and it’s high time he and others like him be held accountable to all Americans who don’t have the power of a Senate office to force the truth out of them,” Marshall said. “That’s why it’s so important we take back the House and Senate so further in-depth hearings can be held.”
Over the course of the pandemic, Fauci has faced aggressive questioning from Marshall and other senators like Rand Paul of Kentucky. The exchanges are often used by the senators to drum up publicity and donations among their base, where Fauci has become a villain for his vocal advocacy in support of COVID-19 precautions during the pandemic.
He said the type of political attacks from Marshall and Paul are a marked difference from when he was working with HIV/AIDS activists in the 1980s.
In the midst of the epidemic, when few resources were being allocated to fighting the disease, Fauci was a frequent target of the activist group ACT UP. Playwright Larry Kramer, who helped found the group, at one point wrote an essay titled “An open letter to incompetent idiot Dr. Anthony Fauci: I call you a murderer.”
ACT UP launched a large protest on the grounds of the National Institutes of Health in 1989, where they carried an effigy of Fauci’s head on a stick.
But Fauci had built up a friendship with some of the activists then, and listened to their concerns. Activist Peter Staley even gave Fauci a heads up that ACT UP was planning to protest his office. He said the fact that he considers the fact that he reached out to and embraced the activists one of his finest hours.
“They, very much, were saying things that were reasonable and needed to be addressed,” Fauci said. “The lack of attention and the lack of resources that were being put into HIV and their confrontation was to gain our attention, which we didn’t give them. And when I started to listen to what they were saying, I became convinced that what they were saying is very, very true and needed to be addressed.”
He said that is a big difference from the protests surrounding COVID-19, which he called a deliberate attempt to distort reality. He raised concerns about the misinformation surrounding COVID-19 and the “normalization of untruths,” where there are so many things that are untrue online that people have trouble determining fact from fiction.
Then there’s the tone of the criticism.
“There was never any impugning of my integrity or anything,” Fauci said of the HIV/AIDS activists. “It was always a question of a disagreement with a policy.”
