President Donald Trump has withdrawn the taxpayer-funded security detail assigned to former National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Trump pulled Fauci’s National Institutes of Health-funded security detail Thursday night and Fauci is now paying for private security. Fauci’s decades-long government career went largely unnoticed — save for a brief period of prominence during the AIDS crisis — until he became the public face of the fight against Covid-19, drawing the ire of those who felt the government went too far in trying to curtail the virus.
Fauci is the latest Trump administration official-turned-opponent to lose his security detail after former national security adviser John Bolton and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo. Bolton and Pompeo have both been subject to credible threats from Iran in retaliation for the 2020 drone strike of Iranian revolutionary guard corps commander Qasem Soleimani.
“You can’t have a security detail for the rest of your life because you worked for government,” Trump said at a press conference Friday.
“They made a lot of money, they can hire their own security too,” he added, referring to Fauci and Pompeo.
Right before leaving office, former president Joe Biden pardoned Fauci to shield him from potential criminal investigations by the Trump Justice Department. Fauci responded to the pardon by thanking Biden for it while continuing to insist he had done nothing to warrant prosecution. Democrats lionized Fauci for his leadership during the pandemic period, especially because of his public disputes with President Trump.
Fauci was a leading proponent of destructive pandemic prevention measures, including widespread lockdowns, social distancing guidelines, and mask mandates. He worked to undermine the lab leak theory of Covid-19 origins, helping orchestrate a paper in Nature at the start of the pandemic that was meant to discredit the theory, according to emails released by a House panel that investigated the pandemic.
Fauci testified before congress multiple times about the U.S.-funded research in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began. Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) grilled Fauci about those experiments and whether or not they constituted gain-of-function research, an experimental method of making lab viruses more deadly.
Fauci insisted those experiments were not gain-of-function, even though internal NIH documents appeared to show otherwise. Paul and other critics of Fauci believe he should be prosecuted for perjury because of his statements about gain-of-function research.
When testifying before the congressional panel, Fauci admitted the lab leak was not a conspiracy theory and said the six-feet apart social distancing guidelines were not based on scientific evidence. He also admitted there was no scientific evidence to justify masking children and blamed other decision makers for school closures.
The U.S. government cut off taxpayer funding to EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit behind the Wuhan research, for five years following sustained scrutiny from the Covid-19 congressional panel about its lack of transparency about the research experiments.