WASHINGTON — A lawmaker who made headlines for grilling Dr. Anthony Fauci on the House floor shared what Americans should keep in mind Wednesday when the public health official faces Congress for the first time in two years.
Fauci will testify in front of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — chaired by his longtime critic, Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul — marking the first time the face of the government-led U.S. medical establishment’s COVID-19 response has appeared on Capitol Hill since June 2024. Republican Georgia Rep. Rich McCormick — one of just 20 physicians in Congress — told the Daily Caller News Foundation that, due to receiving a preemptive pardon on President Joe Biden’s last day in office, Fauci may not feel like he even has to answer any of the senators’ questions.
“Anybody who realized what happened in the political Biden era — he [Fauci] got basically a pardon, so he doesn’t feel pressured,” McCormick told the DCNF in an exclusive interview. “He can plead the Fifth on anything. He’s never been forthcoming or honest about what his opinions were.”
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The congressman — who served as a Marine Corps helicopter pilot and emergency room doctor — said that the Fauci-endorsed “one size fits all” push of the COVID vaccine on Americans may have been a way to cover up the fact that U.S. taxpayer money was used to fund “gain of function” research at a lab in Wuhan, China, the city where the COVID virus originated.
“He tried to cover it up. He tried to make everybody get a vaccination, thinking ‘one size fits all,’” McCormick told the DCNF. “You had people who already had immunity that you’re giving vaccinations to that had hyper immune responses that caused real harm. That was by government design — not that they wanted to harm people, but they thought, ‘one size fit all.’”
“You forced people in order to live a normal life to do that,” he emphasized. “Shame on you.”
The last time Fauci appeared in front of lawmakers, the Georgia Republican grilled him for having appeared to called hesitancy to get the COVID vaccine “ideological bullshit.”
“[Y]ou’re going to have schools, universities, and colleges [that] are going to say, ‘You want to come to this college? Buddy, you’re going to get vaccinated,’” Fauci said in the summer of 2021. “And it’s been proven that when you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their ideological bullshit and they get vaccinated.”
McCormick pressed the doctor during on this quote during a June 2024 hearing held by the now-concluded House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which he had served on. Specifically, the congressman asked the public health official if “all objections to COVID vaccinations [are] ideological bullshit.”
Fauci answered “no” and claimed this was not what he was referring to.
“I encourage everybody to listen to the clip because it’s his own words. We caught him on tape talking on a show, basically saying, ‘You’re going to get this vaccination, or we’re going to make your life miserable. You’re going to lose all that ideological BS,’ and he used the real word, ‘once I make your life miserable,’” the congressman told the DCNF. “Once I make your life miserable because you can’t go to school, you can’t travel, you can’t go to work, you’ll lose all that ideology.”
The congressman pushed back when Fauci answered “no” to his “ideological bullshit” question during the 2024 hearing, stating, “Well, in reference to making it hard for people to get education, traveling, working, I’d say it very much was in context.”
“In other words, if I don’t want the vaccination, I’m going to force you to get the vaccination,” McCormick told the DCNF, reflecting on the confrontation. “This was planned all along. They funded COVID research in Wuhan. Maybe we didn’t even authorize it, but it was our money that was used because they asked for funding.”
“They won’t give us access to computers. Scientists disappeared. Look, it looks like a duck, it swims like a duck, it’s a duck. We understand what happened over there,” the congressman continued.
McCormick went on to excoriate Fauci for pushing lengthy stringent lockdowns on the American people in the name of public health science.
“He’s like, ‘Well, stay in place.’ Nobody can live in their own home for years on end and still get a job done. You’ll kill businesses around America,” the congressman stated. “It sounds great from your standpoint. ‘Oh, look, nobody dies when they stay at home.’ Yes they do. They just die a lot slower.”
“You may not die from COVID but you’re going to die from isolation and depression and anxiety and suicidality and drug and alcohol abuse, all of which happened during that COVID era because of his policies,” he pointed out.
Despite all this, McCormick still doubts Fauci would be ever held accountable for his response to the virus’s outbreak due to the fact Biden had pardoned him “for things he hasn’t even been charged” on.
“This is this is why we probably need to rein in how we do the pardon system,” the congressman said. “I think pardoning somebody for something they haven’t even been charged with is excessive. But, quite frankly, Fauci is a bad actor.”
McCormick also noted one cannot “be put in jail for stupidity” as long as no malicious intent is proven.
“And a lot of the stuff he [Fauci] did just wasn’t scientific. It was political. He thought he was doing the right thing. He was wrong,” the congressman added.
He then referred to some of the public health official’s emails some say raise questions the medical community might have covered up the true nature of COVID’s origins.
“So, that’s the question on some of these emails where he was talking about covering up things, some of these emails where they’re trying to cover up the investments in Wuhan and their intentions. I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to pretend he’s guilty or not guilty,” McCormick told the DNCF. “Certainly, I think he was unethical and certainly not scientific.”
“And certainly, the censorship of myself and other physicians who were going off of science-based— and treating patients firsthand during COVID,” he underscored.
McCormick said that, despite having treated thousands of COVID patients, he was “demonized” and “censored online” for his views on the virus.
“There was basically government-directed media censoring their opponents. That was as communist as you get. And yet, the left loves that,” he said. “Don’t forget that the left is about two-thirds socialist. And when I say ‘socialist,’ they embrace controlling the narrative.”
“The government gets to define truth. It’s not socialist, it’s communist,” he concluded. “Let’s call it what it is.”
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