Dr. Drew: I 'Can't Trust' Fauci Because Top Doc Wasn't Transparent About Connections to Wuhan Lab
TV personality and physician Dr. Drew Pinsky said he can no longer trust Dr. Anthony Fauci due to Fauci’s behavior in recent months and especially with regard to his reported role in funding virus research at a lab in China.
Pinsky sat down with conservative commentator and host Dave Rubin of Blaze Media for an interview published on Tuesday. During the interview, Pinsky was clear that Fauci was for decades a source for information he could trust — until now.
“So, I’ve heard you talk about your experience with Fauci, then, and you’ve been I think very fair to Fauci. I would say almost overly fair,” Rubin said to Pinsky.
“I’ve been overly fair because I’ve been through five pandemics with him,” Pinsky said of Fauci. “He was my really my man during HIV, MERS, SARS-1, H1N1. H1N1 was a terrible pandemic. You don’t even know what happened … That was bad, and you’re worrying about this one. Why didn’t we have a moderate reaction to that one at least?”
“So, I figured he had been adulterated by … what everyone’s getting adulterated with, which is the tribalism of our time,” he said of Fauci. “And I thought he would revert to the mean. I thought his overall function has always been — like, his judgment has been awesome and … I still to this day believe we’ll see a reversion to the mean in terms of him looking OK.”
“However,” Pinsky said, “he finally did something that upset me, which was, I don’t know if you remember in front of Congress, multiple times, whenever they would ask him about the gain-of-function or funding — he would just be like, ‘I’m confused. What are you talking about?’”
“Two days ago he goes, ‘Well you know, we did fund change viral function.’ … Why didn’t you tell us? … Now it’s like, ‘OK, I can’t trust you.’ You knew what we were asking.”
“Be open about this, trust the American people to be able to digest what you’re telling them, and give them a recommendation and then move on,” he continued. “You’ve got to be open and honest. You cannot obfuscate. This is dissembling.”
Speaking of Fauci’s role with regard to the National Institutes of Health and funding research at the Wuhan Lab of Virology, Pinsky let it be known he’s for now written off Fauci, the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, as an honest source for reliable information, and that he understands why others have, too.
Pinsky wouldn’t comment on whether Fauci intentionally lied to Congress, but he did say Fauci’s behavior and lack of transparency have created “vaccine hesitancy.”
“I’ve gotten to the point now where I’m telling [vaccine-hesitant] people, your problem … is you don’t know who to trust,” he said, advising people to find a doctor their family can trust who will discuss with them and their children what is best for them.
Pinsky also stated he is “generally” against the idea of mandating things like masks and vaccines.
WARNING: the following video contains language that some viewers might find offensive.
But the point of the conversation was clear. Taking what Fauci says with a grain of salt is becoming more acceptable for people in the medical community and for people like Pinsky, who stand to lose a great deal by speaking out in today’s political climate.
Fauci of course denied multiple times when testifying before Congress this year that the NIH had anything to do with funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Lab. He’s had it out more than once with Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
We now know, thanks to NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak and a report from The Intercept that Fauci’s denials were allegedly not true.
“Documents obtained by The Intercept contain new evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the nearby Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, along with their collaborator, the U.S.-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, have engaged in what the U.S. government defines as ‘gain-of-function research of concern,’ intentionally making viruses more pathogenic or transmissible in order to study them, despite stipulations from a U.S. funding agency that the money not be used for that purpose,” The Intercept reported in September.
“Grant money for the controversial experiment came from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci.”
Fauci has been front and center since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and since the beginning, he’s undercut his own messaging seemingly on a weekly basis. He’s also become the face of government overreach, ineptitude, cruelty and dishonesty — and he’s lost Dr. Drew’s trust after nearly four decades.
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