Dr. Anthony Fauci, the public face of the federal government's coronavirus pandemic response, is facing criticism on social media over a manuscript published in a top journal where he maintains his position that the virus originated in nature and cites a debunked claim that President-elect Trump told Americans to inject themselves with bleach to stop the virus.
Fauci, along with researcher Gregory Folkers, published a paper in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal this week with the title, "HIV/AIDS and COVID-19: Shared Lessons from Two Pandemics."
Fauci, who faced intense criticism for his handling of the pandemic, was critical of Trump’s handling of the pandemic in the paper.
"With COVID-19, the role of political leadership at the highest level – or the lack thereof – was again shown to be critical," the authors wrote. "As COVID-19 exploded globally and in the United States, President Donald Trump frequently minimized the seriousness of the pandemic, repeatedly claiming that COVID-19 would just ‘go away’ In the first full year of the pandemic (2020, the last year of his presidency) he failed to use his bully pulpit to encourage people to use available ‘low-tech’ tools such as masks/respirators, better ventilation, and physical distancing to reduce the risk of infection."
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"Trump also gave credence to unproven and potentially dangerous substances for COVID-19 prevention and treatment such as bleach injections, the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine and the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. Many of his hundreds of communications during the COVID-19 pandemic were missed opportunities for political leadership in promoting policies and practices to mitigate the impact of a raging pandemic."
The paper also says that "abundant evidence from top evolutionary virologists and leading scientists in other fields strongly suggests that the virus jumped species from an animal reservoir to humans in the Huanan market in Wuhan, China, and then spread throughout China and the rest of the world."
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Several media outlets have fact-checked and debunked the claim that Trump instructed people to inject themselves with bleach including Politifact, which called President Biden’s accusation "mostly false."
"Fauci is an embarrassment," conservative communicator Steve Guest posted on X.
"Oy vey," National Review contributor Pradeep Shanker posted on X.
"Fauci is out with a new scientific paper on HIV/AIDS & COVID-19 where he falsely claims Trump told people to inject bleach & where he argues COVID-19 has a natural origin (Wuhan lab leak not even mentioned) by citing the same authors who wrote the infamous Proximal Origins paper," author and journalist Jerry Dunleavy posted on X.
Fox News Digital reached out to the NIH for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
