Please Don't Throw Anthony Fauci In Jail!

Fucking A, these people.

He did it! Convicted felon Donald Trump has confirmed the fears of public health experts, doctors, nurses, parents who would prefer their children not contract potentially deadly diseases at school, and generally sane people everywhere by nominating cranky antivax weirdo and animal corpse enthusiast Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the job of Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Man, if you thought measles was excited about making a comeback two years ago, imagine how it must feel now. Probably like a lion gazing at a giant herd of zebras covering nearly every inch of the Serengeti.

You know who is probably not excited about the latest nominee in Trump’s Cabinet of Horrors? Our old friend Dr. Anthony Fauci, a perfectly decent long-time public servant, a leader in the government’s study of and response to chronic illnesses and deadly diseases for the last four or five decades, and the point man on the Trump administration’s response to the COVID pandemic and the rapid development of a vaccine that was about the only success story that came out of the Trump administration during its first four years in power.

He is also a man whom America’s possible next HHS Secretary has accused of being part of a conspiracy with pharmaceutical companies to make Americans sicker, or some shit, we don’t know, he starts in on that stuff and our eyes roll so hard up into our skull that we can see our own brain. But according to The Atlantic, it has something to do with a belief that Fauci conspired with Big Pharma to make up fraudulent studies showing hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were unsafe COVID treatments, with the goal of initiating global lockdowns so someone could build more 5G cellular networks.

Or something. Again, eyes, brain, etc.

So now, with Trump’s election, his newly empowered MAGA allies are resurrecting calls to prosecute Fauci for something or other: Murder, crimes against humanity, making them feel bad by explaining over and over that they should not eat fish tank cleaner to cure COVID, and who knows what else.

Perhaps no elected official has been dumber on any of this than Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, with whom Fauci has clashed many times in very entertaining fashion. Now that Republicans hold the Senate majority, Paul will take over as chairman of the chamber’s Government Oversight subcommittee, and he is planning to use his newfound power to keep investigating the government’s pandemic response and make everyone admit that they are wrong and the wild-ass conspiracy theories bouncing around the howling void in his skull are right.

Rand Paul Flogs Fever Dreams About Fauci Creating COVID

Dr. Fauci Goes Rand Paul's Neighbor In Senate Hearing

Paul has long bought into the idea that COVID came out of a Chinese laboratory, and that the research that produced the virus in that Chinese lab was funded and approved by Fauci when he ran the National Institutes of Health. Fauci has heatedly denied this in multiple hearings, but Paul is a Republican so by definition he knows more about every subject than the people who have devoted their lives and careers to studying it.

A couple of experts told The Washington Post that Paul “doesn’t follow the evidence and the known science,” and also that his jackassery will just make everything worse:

Amesh A. Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, wrote in an email that he worried that Paul’s investigations could “further tribalize and sensationalize what should be a sober scientific inquiry into the Chinese government’s transparency,” citing the “bombastic” questions posed to Fauci in congressional inquiries.

Fauci is a retired almost-84-year-old man, and he is going to spend a chunk of his retirement getting dragged up to Capitol Hill so Rand Paul can badger him about whether or not he pumped up the danger of COVID because he was being secretly paid by Big Pharma or Big Surgical Mask or whatever other vaguely suspicious sounding term he can make up by putting the word “Big” in front of something fairly anodyne.

Of course, Paul isn’t the only other weirdo threatening to use the GOP’s new power to go after Fauci. Elon Musk tweeted that his pronouns, as he has said before, are still “prosecute/Fauci.” Ho ho, a pronoun joke, masterful punning, sir.

Marjorie Taylor Greene answered Musk’s argument by tweeting that she was in agreement with Apartheid Andy, adding, “I told Dr. Fauci to his face that he should be jailed and prosecuted for crimes against humanity.”

Sure thing, we should do that just as soon as we charge all the voters of Georgia’s 14th Congressional District with crimes against humanity for returning Greene to Congress every two years.

As ever, we expect this all to come to absolutely nothing thanks to Rand Paul and his cohorts always being wrong about everything. But they sure will make a fuckton of noise doing it.

[The Atlantic / Washington Post / Newsweek]

Wonkette is a pro-vaccine, reader-supported publication.