Marjorie Taylor Greene pretends to care about HIV in bizarre attack on Dr Anthony Fauci

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is trying to turn HIV activists against infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci despite her years of anti-LGBTQ+ and HIV-phobic actions and words.

“Dr Fauci is coming in tomorrow to our COVID committee for a transcribed interview,” Greene wrote in a January 7 X post. “He owes answers about his role in gain of function, COVID lockdowns, COVID vaxxes, and how much money he made from vaccines.”

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“He also should answer to AIDS activists and these poor beagles.”

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Dr Fauci is coming in tomorrow to our COVID committee for a transcribed interview.

He owes answers about his role in gain of function, COVID lockdowns, COVID vaxxes, and how much money he made from vaccines.

He also should answer to AIDS activists and these poor beagles. https://t.co/bkG9EsbApj pic.twitter.com/qzpkgAMksJ

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) January 8, 2024

Conservatives have targeted Dr. Fauci as the public face of the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic — namely the masking, shutdown, and vaccination promotion — while he served as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Conservative legislators have repeatedly hammered Fauci’s agency for backing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) giving of $3.7 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a laboratory in China that conducted “gain of function” research examining how viruses jump from animals to human populations — this research can be used to prevent future pandemics. Republicans have accused the research of creating the COVID-19 virus and causing the pandemic; U.S. intelligence agencies believe that the virus was natural.

Around the same time, Fauci also came under bipartisan criticism over a $1.68 million taxpayer-funded NIAID grant to a Tunisian laboratory to conduct drug and “de-barking” experiments on beagle puppies. Beagles are often used to test toxicity and in pharmaceutical research.

This isn’t the first time that Greene has tried to turn HIV activists against Fauci. In January 2023, she shared a post from a right-wing journalist criticizing Dr. Fauci’s work during the height of the AIDS epidemic.

“Did you know gay liberal activists stormed the NIH [National Institutes of Health] in 1990?” the post stated. “They blamed Dr. Anthony Fauci for blocking cheap and effective AIDS treatments and for only promoting expensive and toxic drugs that benefited Big Pharma. Fauci did the exact same thing during Covid-19.” 

The post was accompanied by a video of angry ACT UP protestors yelling “Storm the NIH,” carrying anti-Fauci signs, and blaming the NIH for refusing to use its resources to find a cure and treatment for HIV/AIDS as well as having a conflict of interest with the pharmaceutical companies.

While her historical claim was true, one major difference between the AIDS activists and Greene (and her anti-vaccine followers) is that the AIDS activists were fighting for access to medical treatments and not against them.

While Greene appears to be sympathizing with HIV activists now, she has made HIV-phobic comments in the past. In October 2021, she attacked the NBA for allowing an HIV-positive person to play basketball.

“The fascist NBA won’t let Kyrie Irving play for refusing a vaccine. But yet they still let Magic Johnson play with HIV,” Greene wrote in an October 14, 2021 post. However, the comparison is uneven.

When Johnson came out as HIV-positive in 1991, the NBA allowed him to play because the HIV epidemic had been going on for nearly a decade and showed that HIV-positive people couldn’t transmit the virus to others through sweat, saliva, or non-sexual physical contact. COVID-19, on the other hand, is a respiratory virus that had only been around for one year by 2021 and is more far easily transmitted than HIV since it’s transmitted via air droplets and close contact.

I was 16 yrs old in 1990 and did not know this. https://t.co/2omHdyChVN

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) January 17, 2023