“I think he was vulnerable, I think he had a lot of liability on creating… coronavirus,” said U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a “The Tucker Carlson Show” interview released Monday. He was referring to former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Before leaving office earlier this year, former President Joe Biden issued a pardon for Fauci, who became one of the faces of COVID-19 mitigation efforts during the pandemic. In that position, Fauci was the subject of much praise and much criticism. Vaccine skeptics and those opposed to lockdown mandates, often right-leaning or MAGA voters, were especially critical of the public health expert.
“FOR ANY OFFENSES against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House COVID-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President,” reads the pardon.
“Why did he need a pardon in advance?” Kennedy asked Carlson.
An article published in the BMJ journal said the pardon was intended to protect Fauci, who was the subject of death threats. President Donald Trump has dropped Secret Service protection that Fauci used to have as of this year, Kennedy told Carlson.
Kennedy is from a prominent Democratic family and identified as a Democrat through the pandemic. However, he was also vociferous vaccine skeptic. In 2022, social media pages for the Children’s Health Defense non-profit established by Kennedy to advocate for “vaccine injured children” were taken down, per an Audacy report.
When he first threw his hat in the ring for the 2024 presidential election, Kennedy was still a Democrat. He then switched to run as an independent and eventually suspended his campaign to support the Republican candidate and current President Trump, effectively joining the MAGA movement. He also wrote a book – “The Real Anthony Fauci” – about Fauci in 2021.
“As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci dispenses $6.1 billion in annual taxpayer-provided funding for rigged scientific research, allowing him to dictate the subject, content, and outcome of scientific health research across the globe – truly a dark agenda,” said the book’s description.
According to a piece published earlier this year in the New Yorker, the nearly 500-page book “is packed with discussions of clinical studies,” and has sold more than 1 million copies, though it was not reviewed by many major outlets. While the New Yorker noted that Kennedy has become known for “unfounded beliefs and suspicions,” it also said some of his “revolt isn’t against research but against the power long held by scientific insiders like Fauci. And in this he might have a point.”
Fauci became a national power player in public health during the AIDS epidemic. His decisions back then were controversial, as they were during COVID, and sometimes came with harsh criticism from activists. Larry Kramer of ACT UP even called him a “f**king son of a b***h of a dumb idiot,” and a “murderer” in the late 1980s. However, they were able to put their differences aside and work together – by the time Kramer died in 2020, Kramer told Fauci that he loved him, and Fauci said it back with tears in his eyes, per the New Yorker.
During the COVID pandemic, the possible origins of the pandemic became a contentious issue, the outlet noted. Although there was evidence that it might have escaped from a Wuhan laboratory, blaming the lab risked angering China, stoking racism, and embarrassing U.S. health agencies that had funded the Wuhan research,” the New Yorker explained.
Fauci declared at one point that the lab-leak theory was in the realm of conspiracy theories and Facebook banned lab-leak posts. Kennedy said during his interview that the Biden White House pressured Facebook to censor posts.
This January, The New York Times reported that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency now favors the lab-leak theory.
According to a 2021 article from the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org project, the National Institutes of Health (of which NIAID is a child agency) “awarded a grant to the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance to study the risk of the future emergence of coronaviruses from bats,” that was renewed for another five years in 2019 but cancelled in April 2020.
“EcoHealth ultimately received $3.7 million over six years from the NIH and distributed nearly $600,000 of that total to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, a collaborator on the project, pre-approved by NIH,” said FactCheck.org. At the time the article was published, researchers cited believed the virus was not a laboratory construct.
“He was funding precisely that research at the Wuhan lab,” Kennedy claimed of Fauci during his interview with Carlson. He said that he believes some researchers have a “God complex” and strive to create dangerous infections and said scientists have developed ways to hide evidence of lab manipulation in viruses.
Last summer, Fauci appeared before Congress for a hearing. He said that scientists raised concerns in 2020 that the virus that causes COVID-19 could have been manipulated in a lab but eventually became convinced that it was not manipulated.
“The accusation being circulated that I influenced the scientists to change their minds by bribing them with millions of dollars in grant money is absolutely false, and simply preposterous,” Fauci said, according to CNN.
Kennedy – who has already made changes to vaccine regulation in the U.S. – also discussed vaccines with Carlson. Generally, experts agree that the COVID-19 vaccine was safe and that it worked to stop the spread of the virus and prevent serious illness, but Kennedy has recently dropped recommendations for it, including for pregnant women.
“Do you think, overall, the COVID vaccine killed more than it saved?” Carlson asked Kennedy.
“My opinion about that, is irrelevant,” said the health secretary. He went on to say that: “I would say there’s a lot of skepticism in this agency about mRNA vaccines,” and that he released members of a vaccine advisory panel because they were “sock puppets” for the industry they were supposed to oversee.