Dr. Anthony Fauci expressed concern on Wednesday that the thousands of recently publicized emails revealing his correspondence about the coronavirus early in the pandemic can easily be “taken out of context.”
The emails, which were obtained by both Buzzfeed and the Washington Post through Freedom of Information Act requests and published on Tuesday, brought immediate criticism from Republican lawmakers, including one who called for the doctor’s firing.
“The only trouble is they are really ripe to be taken out of context, where someone can snip out a sentence in an email without showing the other emails and say, ‘Based on an email from Dr. Fauci, he said such-and-such,’ where you don’t really have the full context,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Joe Biden’s top medical adviser, said in an interview with NewsNation’s Leland Vittert.
MSNBC’S NICOLE WALLACE SAYS FAUCI’S EMAILS MAKE HIM ‘LOOK GOOD’ AND HE PASSES ‘THE TEST’
One email shows EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, whose organization has been involved in research at the Wuhan laboratory at the center of inquiries into the coronavirus’s origins, thanking Fauci after he publicly dismissed the idea that the coronavirus may have been created in the lab.
On Wednesday, Fauci, the highest-paid government employee, dismissed the notion that the grant-funded research was connected to Chinese officials.
“We’re not talking about the Communist Chinese Party. We’re not talking about the Chinese military,” Fauci said. “We’re talking about scientists that we’ve had relationships for years.”
Fauci was also pushed on a now-public email, sent before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, in which he dismissed the efficacy of face masks.
“The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out [the] virus, which is small enough to pass through the material,” he wrote in February 2020 to a recipient who is presumed to be Sylvia Burwell, a Health and Human Services secretary under former President Barack Obama. “It might, however, provide some slight benefit in [keeping] out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you.”
Early in the pandemic, public health authorities were worried about the possibility of a shortage of medical-grade masks and that there was little evidence that other types of face coverings were effective, Fauci said in response during the interview.
“We were told at the level of the discussions in the situation room, even by the surgeon general, that there was a problem,” he said. “We didn’t want to have people running to the stores and getting N95s or any other masks.”
“There were no data then,” he added.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to recommend the use of face masks among those who have not been fully vaccinated, though the agency says those who have been fully vaccinated may safely resume pre-pandemic activities.
In the wake of the email dump, Republican lawmakers have slammed the doctor.
“Fauci lost my trust long before this,” Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw wrote on Twitter on Wednesday. “Never contextualizing his statements, never giving honest risk assessments, always treating us like we are too stupid to do anything but lockdown and wear masks forever. The emails show it was worse than we thought.”
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul also took aim, renewing his call for Fauci to be fired.
“Told you,” Paul, who has engaged Fauci in several heated exchanges during Senate committee hearings, tweeted on Wednesday, alongside a “FireFauci” hashtag.
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The Washington Examiner contacted the White House for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
