Lawrence O’Donnell slammed the Republican senators who questioned former U.S. Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci during his Senate hearing on Wednesday, insisting that they “disgraced themselves” with their behavior.
“Republican senators disgraced themselves today attacking the man who saved lives, possibly millions of lives, during the Covid-19 outbreak,” the MS NOW host said Wednesday night. “Not one senator in that room today did one thing to save a single life during the Covid-19 pandemic. Not one of them. But they lined up to get their Covid-19 vaccine shots as soon as they possibly could, and they never thanked Dr. Fauci for helping speed the development of that vaccine.”
During his Wednesday hearing, Fauci notably chose to plead the fifth in response to every Republican question. For his part, O’Donnell not only recapped Fauci’s work during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s, but he also torched Kentucky Senator Rand Paul for his treatment of Fauci.
“Rand Paul has said that Dr. Fauci should be in prison without ever once having named an actual crime that Dr. Fauci could ever be charged with,” the anchor noted. You can watch the full “Last Word” segment in the video below.
O’Donnell continued to call out Republicans for their fixation on Fauci, highlighting the hypocrisy of their investigation of him but not other officials.
“Anthony Fauci helped save millions of lives with his work on HIV medications,” he recalled. “He expanded his life-saving reach to Africa with the support of George W. Bush by creating a president’s emergency fund to support AIDS treatment in Africa that saved over 25 million lives, before Elon Musk and Donald Trump decided that those lives were not worth saving.”
“Not one Republican congressional committee, not one Republican senator is investigating how many thousands of people have died because Donald Trump and Elon Musk took their life-saving HIV medicine away,” O’Donnell continued. “Anthony Fauci owes nothing to Republicans in the United States Senate. He does not owe them an answer to a single question.”
“Sometimes news stories come down to a very simple right and wrong, and this is one of them,” the “Last Word” host concluded. “Anthony Fauci is right, and every one of those Republican senators is very, very wrong.”
