President Trump slammed Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday, not long before the former White House chief medical adviser began his testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“Many more people died of Covid under the Biden Administration than under the Trump Administration,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “‘Operation Warp Speed’ was a SPECTACULAR SUCCESS, in fact, many say, one of the most successful things ever done by an American President. I overrode Fauci on this. His ideas were CRAZY! Also, I said from the beginning that the Virus came from the Wuhan Laboratory in China. Fauci strongly disagreed, always trying to protect China.”
The former adviser pleaded the fifth during Tuesday’s hearing.
Trump, in his post, said he “inherited” Fauci, who previously served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and advised presidents since former President Reagan. He added that the doctor “made too many bad calls, like on MASKS.”
“In any event I didn’t let him shut the Country down, although he wanted to,” the president wrote. “I went the Federalist way, and let the governors decide. The Republican governors did a much better job than the Dumocrats. Fauci was largely taken out of play, and then along came Sleepy Joe Biden, who made Fauci a ‘King!’”
Trump concluded the post saying he advised former President Biden against retaining the doctor in his administration. He accused Biden of going “on to give Fauci vast destructive power. The rest is history!”
Fauci and the president were often at odds throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, differing on health policy and with Trump at times contradicting his guidance.
Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci before leaving office in case he was prosecuted by the Trump administration. Scrutiny among conservatives and Republican lawmakers resulted in a subpoena he received to testify about a purported cover-up of U.S. involvement in viral research at a lab in Wuhan, China, that some Republicans have alleged caused the outbreak
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the committee’s chair and a major critic of Fauci, also publicly released more than 1,000 pages of the doctor’s personal diary entries that documented his response to the pandemic in real-time. The posts detail how Sars-CoV-2 jumped from animals to humans, adding that a wet market in Wuhan was not the source of the virus, but it “was the amplifier.”
Fauci also took credit for the state lockdowns and expressed dissatisfaction with Trump’s rhetorical style during press briefings, at times calling him “very rambling and disorganized.”
Paul, in past Senate hearings, has clashed with Fauci and has staunchly promoted the “lab leak” theory, suggesting that COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November 2019. He has accused the health adviser and other officials of erroneously telling the public that the theory was baseless.
