Dr. Anthony Fauci, leading infectious disease expert and chief medical adviser to US President Joe Biden, asked Fox News to sack its host Jesse Watters for the latter's vitriolic rhetoric against him.
At a conference earlier this week, Watters asked the participants to "ambush" Fauci to create a controversy. Watters said Fauci should be asked if the National Institute of Health funded a research at a lab in Wuhan, China.
“Now you go in for the kill shot. The kill shot? With an ambush? Deadly. Because he doesn’t see it coming” Watters, co-host of the Fox News show 'The Five', had said.
Fauci has often been at the receiving end of criticism by Fox News throughout the pandemic.
When he was asked about the "kill shot" comment by CNN’s John Berman, Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he has only been asking people to be cautious and protect themselves against COVID-19. “For that, you have some guy out there saying people should be giving me a kill shot, to ambush me? what kind of craziness is there in society these days? That’s awful what he said.... Whatever network he is on is not going to do anything. The guy should be fired on the spot,” Fauci has been quoted as saying.
However, Fox defended Watters saying the host's words have been “twisted completely out of context.”
“Based on watching the full clip and reading the entire transcript, it’s more than clear that Jesse Watters was using a metaphor for asking hard-hitting questions to Dr. Fauci about gain-of-function research and his words have been twisted completely out of context,” Fox said in a statement.
