By The FirstThe 359-page transcript from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s sworn deposition has been released by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt. Dr. Fauci was deposed as part of a lawsuit filed by the states of Missouri and Louisiana in which they accused the federal government of colluding with social media companies to censor speech.
“Missouri and Louisiana are leading the way in exposing how the federal government and the Biden Administration worked with social media to censor speech,” AG Schmitt said in a statement. “In our deposition with Dr. Fauci, it became clear that when Dr. Fauci speaks, social media censors.”
Here are a few quick takeaways from the doctor’s deposition:
“I DON’T RECALL”
Apparently Dr. Fauci either has a poor memory or a selective one. According to the transcript, he used the phrase “I don’t recall” 174 times.
TO MASK OR NOT TO MASK?
As late as February 2020, Dr. Fauci was privately telling colleagues not to wear a mask. This echoes public statements Fauci was making at the time, in which he told media outlets that masks were ineffective at stopping viruses.
FAUCI’S TWITTER CONNECTION
Although he was evasive about it, Dr. Fauci eventually acknowledged his personal connection to Twitter: his daughter Ali Fauci who is a software engineer for the social media platform.
According to the transcript, attorney for Missouri John Sauer asked if Fauci was on a first-name basis with somebody at Twitter.
“Well, right now, no, but when my daughter worked at Twitter, I was on a first-name basis with her,” Fauci joked.
NO TIME FOR CRITICS
During one exchange, Fauci claimed that he was too busy to worry about the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement signed by numerous epidemiologists, doctors, and scientists calling for a “Focused Protection” approach to COVID-19 rather than lockdowns and school closures.
“I have a very busy day job running a six billion dollar institute,” said Fauci. “I don’t have time to worry about things like the Great Barrington Declaration.”
Despite what he said in his testimony, Fauci claimed in a 2020 email to Dr. Deborah Birx that he had, in fact, “come out very strongly publicly against the Great Barrington Declaration.”
PRAISE FOR CHINA
Some of Dr. Fauci’s looked to China as an example of how to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak. As Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt notes, “One of Fauci’s deputies joined a WHO delegation to China in February of 2020, and in talking to Fauci afterwards, was impressed with how the Chinese ‘were handling the isolation, the contact tracing, the building of facilities to take care of people.'”
Of course, countless Chinese citizens are now taking to the streets in defiance of China’s “impressive” handling of the virus.
‘I OBJECT!’
There was a considerable amount of hostility between lawyers for Missouri and Louisiana and the Department of Justice. The transcript shows that Adam Kirschner, a lawyer for the Department of Justice, objected 183 times to questions of Fauci.
