Fauci pleads the Fifth over 100 times during Senate hearing
Sheila Gunn Reid and Tamara Ugolini reacted to Anthony Fauci's invoking of the Fifth Amendment 111 times during a Senate hearing, a far cry from his 2022 comments when he said he had "nothing to hide" and would "cooperate fully" with legislators.
Anthony Fauci appeared before a U.S. Senate committee this week and invoked his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent 111 times. This is the same man who, in 2022, said on camera: "I am very happy to testify before any congressional oversight committee. I have nothing to hide. I can explain and validate everything that I've done."
Sheila Gunn Reid and Tamara Ugolini reacted to the former top medical official's comments, or lack thereof, on Thursday's Rebel Roundup livestream.
Prior to Donald Trump's return to the Oval Office, Fauci, who led the U.S. response to COVID-19, was preemptively pardoned by Joe Biden roughly a year and a half ago.
This immunity meant he could not claim a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination on those grounds. His silence, Tamara noted, appeared to be something else entirely. "I hope it's out of shame," Sheila said.
Among the questions he declined to answer were whether he believed NIH-funded research using fingers and scalps from aborted babies — grafted onto the backs of research mice for coronavirus study — was appropriate.
The current director of the National Institutes of Health has since ended that program. And in a separate exchange, senators confronted Fauci with diary entries showing he suffered a pulmonary embolism — a potentially deadly blood clot in the lung — in July 2021, shortly after receiving the Moderna vaccine on national television in a high-profile press conference designed to demonstrate the shot was safe.
He invoked the Fifth on that too.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who addressed the disclosure in a Fox News appearance played during the segment, was critical of the public health bureaucrat, saying "He took the Moderna vaccine on national TV, telling people in a highly publicized press conference to show it was safe"
"Then he got one of the primary, most expected adverse events, potentially deadly blood clots in his lung,” Kennedy said. “He kept that secret from the American public.” Meanwhile, he continued to dismiss vaccine concerns as conspiracy theory and call skeptics dangerous.
Tamara noted the Canadian angle to the hearing, given Health Canada followed the U.S. lead throughout the pandemic — "or we do it worse," Sheila added.
The Moderna vaccine was the one administered to the Canadian military before authorities quietly acknowledged it should not be given to young healthy men. Canada's own COVID-19 face, Dr. Theresa Tam, has since received the Order of Canada for her pandemic efforts.
There has been no comparable congressional-style accountability here.
"Where is Theresa Tam?" Sheila asked. "It won't happen as long as the Liberals are in power. They did this to us. They're not going to have a public inquest into the handling of this because it would show they knew things early on."
The hosts also played a media supercut compiled by Adam Carolla showing the relentless propaganda campaign waged against anyone who questioned the vaccines or mask mandates — journalists, doctors, and commentators telling the public to "listen to the scientists," mocking those who wanted to do their own research, and in one case saying of an unmasked person: "I would want to kill them."
"The people who did this to you want us to just forget," Tamara said. "And there needs to be a reckoning. Because right now we have nothing in place that would prevent any of this from happening tenfold the next time."
Rebel Roundup airs Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 11 a.m. MT / 1 p.m. ET.
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