White Home press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Wednesday took Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to job for joking that “little elf” Dr. Anthony Fauci ought to be thrown throughout the Potomac River.
Jean-Pierre didn't see the humor within the crack — leveled by a possible challenger of her boss in 2024 — saying at her common press briefing that DeSantis advocated a “bodily assault” on President Biden’s chief medical adviser.
“Simply final week, you had Gov. Ron DeSantis [who] steered that Dr. Fauci ought to be bodily assaulted,” Jean-Pierre maintained whereas itemizing examples of a “harmful pattern” of Republicans allegedly advocating violence, a recurring theme in her press briefings just lately and approaching the heels of feedback from Biden final week likening Trump help to “semi-fascism.”
DeSantis informed a cheering crowd final week that “somebody must seize that little elf and chuck him throughout the Potomac” due to his “poor” therapy of kids throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fauci, 81, mentioned final week that he intends to retire in December.
Jean-Pierre mentioned that different Republicans additionally had advocated violence, together with former President Donald Trump, although she didn’t supply a particular instance, and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), who shared a cartoon final yr of himself attacking Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
Fauci is the longtime director of the Nationwide Institute of Allergy and Infectious Ailments and emerged as a heroic determine to Democrats throughout the pandemic. He's portrayed by followers as a accountable public well being chief.
Republicans have slammed Fauci, together with for not initially recommending protecting anti-coronavirus face masks, solely to later urge carrying a number of masks, and for his company’s hyperlinks to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which not directly obtained US funding to carry out “acquire of perform” analysis earlier than the pandemic.
Fauci sought to tamp down early hypothesis that COVID-19 could have emerged from a lab leak, although the US intelligence group subsequently mentioned a lab-leak in Wuhan is considered one of two “believable” explanations for the pandemic’s origins, along with a pure animal-to-human transmission.
Paperwork launched final yr revealed that EcoHealth Alliance used US taxpayer dollars on Wuhan lab experiments that changed three bat coronaviruses distinct from COVID-19 and found they turned way more infectious amongst “humanized” mice when human-type receptors have been added to them.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has engaged in a sequence of contentious clashes with Fauci over his company’s hyperlinks to the Wuhan lab.
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