Twitter owner Elon Musk appeared to call for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be brought up on criminal charges in a tweet on Sunday that also poked fun at people who post their gender pronouns.
“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” Musk posted on Twitter Sunday morning. He also posted a photoshopped image of the retiring White House chief medical adviser whispering in President Biden’s ear captioned, “JUST ONE MORE LOCKDOWN MY KING…”
Musk later elaborated on why he thought Fauci — the face of America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic — should be prosecuted.
“He lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome IMO,” he wrote on Twitter.
From the archives (January 2022): Republican senator seeks to leverage clash with Fauci to build support for financial-disclosure bill he’s calling the FAUCI Act
The infectious-disease expert, elevated to chief presidential medical adviser by Biden in 2021, has said he will be stepping down from both his position in the Biden administration and as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the end of the year.
Musk’s missives came as House Republicans have accused the outgoing public health official of lying about funding gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at a lab in Wuhan, China.
The 81-year-old Fauci — who has served under every president since Ronald Reagan — has told Congress that the NIH funded research on bat coronaviruses but had not genetically engineered the virus to be more transmissible to humans.
He said last month that he would “absolutely” cooperate with any congressional investigation into his handling of the pandemic and has maintained that his response to the health emergency was based on science, not politics.
Musk, who has called himself a centrist, has claimed to have acquired Twitter with the intent to increase free speech on the platform. He urged voters to cast ballots for Republican House candidates in the midterm elections last month as way to check Democratic power in Washington.
His ongoing “Twitter files” releases have seen contrarian writers attempting to show in lengthy tweet threads based on internal messages and other sources how the company allegedly suppressed tweets from right-wing users and for a time banned the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the weeks before his father’s 2020 election victory, as well as removing Donald Trump from the platform in the waning days of his presidency, following the violent events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Until last month, Twitter had also policed a torrent of misinformation and conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic and viruses.
See: ‘The Twitter files’ show company’s internal debate on how to handle Hunter Biden laptop story
Musk’s tweet also harked back to other statements he has made about gender pronouns. He has previously tweeted, “I absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare” and “Pronouns suck.”
Musk — who has an 18-year-old transgender child — made headlines on the issue of gender identity in October after he blamed “neo-Marxists” at educational institutions for creating a wedge between him and his daughter.
Vivian Jenna Wilson, 18, who was born Xavier Alexander Musk, legally changed her identity to a woman this year and dropped her surname to avoid being linked to her famous father.
His tweet on Sunday prompted other users to fire back at the megabillionaire on the social-media site, including over his past statements about the pandemic.
Some shared a tweet from Musk in mid-March 2020, in which he predicted the coronavirus would basically be eradicated in the U.S. within a month, while others reminded him of his tweet the same month that read as follows: “The coronavirus panic is dumb.”
Key Words (March 2022): Elon Musk says he ‘supposedly’ has COVID again
Former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan had particularly harsh words for the SpaceX and Tesla
TSLA,
honcho, who acquired Twitter despite persistent questions about the seriousness of his pursuit of the company — his per-share bid contained a cannabis joke, for example — and a high-profile attempt to back out of the deal.
“Dr. Fauci is a national hero who will be remembered for generations to come for his innate goodness & many contributions to public health,” Brennan wrote. “Despite your business success, you will be remembered most for fueling public hate & divisions. You may have money, but you have no class.”
Rep. Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat, said Musk’s calls for prosecuting Fauci were incendiary. “Elon Musk wants to criminalize Anthony Fauci because he disagrees with him. Elon is no champion of free speech,” he wrote.
Fauci became a political lightning rod when he pushed back against lawmakers who questioned the seriousness of the virus and the vaccine’s effectiveness.
He was also at the center of debate about the effectiveness of lockdowns and travel advisories, which were initially rolled out in densely populated Democrat-governed states like California and New York.
Musk defiantly reopened a Tesla production facility in the Bay Area in May 2020, reportedly leading to hundreds of COVID cases among employees.
The virus had killed about 1.1 million Americans, including 2,981 last week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Read on: Coronavirus tally: U.S. cases continue to climb and are now up 56% from two weeks ago
MarketWatch contributed.
