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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday promised to “bring a reckoning” to former White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci if DeSantis is elected to the White House.
“We cannot allow Anthony Fauci to escape accountability,” DeSantis wrote in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “I am the only candidate who will bring a reckoning for what tyrants like Fauci did to our country during COVID.”
Fauci participated in a two-day interview with lawmakers on Monday and Tuesday this week. In the wake of the first interview, the Republican-run House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic posted takeaways on X.
The subcommittee said Fauci “repeatedly played semantics with the definition of gain-of-function in an attempt to avoid conceding that NIH funded this dangerous research” and “signed off on every foreign and domestic NIAID grant without reviewing the proposals.”
Democrats blasted the GOP for distorting Fauci’s closed-door testimony,
“The Republicans have totally distorted Dr. Fauci’s testimony, ongoing testimony, which will be available in a transcript,” Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) told reporters, in reference to the X posts. “And I hope that that won’t take too long, because I think that will be very illuminating to you and to the public.”
DeSantis is a noted critic of Fauci, once boasting about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic by saying he prevented the Sunshine State from becoming a “Faucian dystopia.”
“I think we were one of the first states to see the experts were getting it wrong, and we resolved to charge a different course,” DeSantis said in March. “We are not going to let this state descend into a Faucian dystopia, not on our watch.”
DeSantis is trailing former President Trump in national polls and surveys of early primary and caucus states. He’s set to debate former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley Wednesday night in what could be a pivotal debate ahead of the Iowa caucuses next week.
