Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and part of Trump’s coronavirus task force, said “Looking at what we’re seeing now, I would say between 100,000 and 200,000 cases… excuse me, deaths. But I don’t want to be held to that. I mean, we’re going to have millions of cases.”
Fauci has become a target of the far right, the New York Times reports: “An analysis by The New York Times found over 70 accounts on Twitter that have promoted the hashtag #FauciFraud, with some tweeting as frequently as 795 times a day. The anti-Fauci sentiment is being reinforced by posts from Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group; Bill Mitchell, host of the far-right online talk show “YourVoice America”; and other outspoken Trump supporters such as Shiva Ayyadurai, who has falsely claimed to be the inventor of email. Many of the anti-Fauci posts, some of which pointed to a seven-year-old email that Dr. Fauci had sent praising Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of State, have been retweeted thousands of times. On YouTube, conspiracy-theory videos about Dr. Fauci have racked up hundreds of thousands of views in the past week. In private Facebook groups, posts disparaging him have also been shared hundreds of times and liked by thousands of people, according to the Times analysis.”
