Dr. Anthony Fauci said he and his family continue to get death threats because of his high-profile guidance on the coronavirus pandemic.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, revealed Wednesday his family has been forced to hire personal security since at least early April because of the intimidation.
Fauci, who is on the White House coronavirus task force, said his three daughters, who live in different cities, have been harassed.
“Getting death threats for me and my family and harassing my daughters to the point where I have to get security is just, I mean, it’s amazing,” Fauci said during an online forum sponsored by Harvard University that CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta moderated. “I wouldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams that people who object to things that are pure public health principles are so set against it and don’t like what you and I say, namely in the world of science, that they actually threaten you.”
Fauci has advised six presidents on matters of public health, but recently has sometimes made statements that have contradicted President Trump.
After Trump said multiple times today that the virus will just “go away,” Fauci says to Reuters: “I don't think we’re going to eradicate this from the planet because it's such a highly transmissible virus that that seems unlikely.”
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) August 5, 2020
Fauci called the threats “unseemly things that crises bring out in the world,” adding that “it brings out the best of people and the worst of people.
“We live in a very big country, and we often leave the decisions about the implementation of things at the local level. And what we’ve seen is a great disparity in how individual states, cities responded,” he said.
