Beyond #FireFauci: Conspiracy Theorists Claim Fauci ‘Directly Responsible’ For COVID-19 – By Peter Montgomery (Right Wing Watch) / April 22 2020
While some right-wing activists have called on President Donald Trump to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, a prominent voice during the COVID-19 pandemic, one far-right conspiracy theory site is telling millions of viewers that being fired is “the nicest thing that could be done to Fauci” and is calling him a traitorous criminal who is “directly responsible” for the development of the coronavirus.
Fauci heads the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and has sometimes angered Trump supporters by correcting misinformation dispensed by the president. On April 12, Trump retweeted a call by failed congressional candidate and conspiracy theorist DeAnna Lorraine to “#FireFauci.”
Conspiracy site Next News Network went a step further on April 16, publishing a long interview with Dr. Rashid Buttar who, as Media Matters noted in its report on the video, “proceeded to push multiple falsehoods and conspiracy theories,” including the claim that not a single death had actually been demonstrated to be caused by the COVID-19 virus. Buttar claimed that social distancing guidelines defy “every logical aspect of science and medicine.”
Buttar accused Fauci of violating a government moratorium on a type of “chimeric” research and directing funding toward research that Buttar claims led to the creation of the COVID-19 virus in a North Carolina lab. Host Gary Franchi said that research was then outsourced to China.
Here’s part of the exchange about Fauci between host Gary Franchi and Buttar, who has been described by Huffington Post as “a widely discredited osteopath”:
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