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, 51, did not elaborate why he thought Fauci — the face of America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic — should be prosecuted. The 81-year-old has said he will be stepping down from both his position in the Biden administration and as director of the 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 official of lying about funding gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at a lab in Wuhan, China.
The nation’s top infectious disease expert — who served as top medical advisor to every president since Ronald Regan — has told Congress that the NIH had funded research on bat coronaviruses, but had not genetically engineered the virus to be more transmissible to humans.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2022
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, acquired Twitter with the intent to stop censorship and bring back free speech to the platform. He urged voters to cast ballots for Republican House candidates in the midterm elections last month as way to check power in Washington.
His recently released bombshell “Twitter Files” have shown an insider’s perspective of how the company purportedly suppressed tweets from right-wing users under former owner Jack Dorsey, and banned The Post’s exposé on Hunter Biden’s eyebrow raising business practices following its publication in the weeks before his father’s 2020 victory.
Until last month, Twitter had also policed a torrent of misinformation and conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic and viruses.
Musk’s tweet also harkened back to other statements he has made about gender pronouns. He has previously also 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 cheeky tweet on Sunday prompted other users to fire back at the mega-billionaire 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 US within a month, while others reminded him of his tweet the same month that read “The coronavirus panic is dumb.”
Former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan had particularly harsh words for the Tesla honcho.
“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, before asking donors for money to defeat Republicans in the 2024 election.
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.
The virus had killed about 1.1 million Americans, including 2,981 last week, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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