Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday he worries about the future of the U.S. because of the rising "normalization of untruths."
The former White House chief medical advisor's comments came in response to a question at the Hill's Future of Health Care Summit about whether he is worried about the country heading into the 2024 election.
"I worry about the country a lot because what we're seeing - and I think anybody who just takes a deep breath and looks at what's going on - that we are in an arena, an era, of what I call the normalization of untruths," Fauci said.
"There are so many misrepresentations and distortions of reality and conspiracy theory, that it almost becomes normalized," he added. "We should not accept that as the new normal because when facts are no longer accepted as facts, when distortions occur and when reality is distorted, that will undermine the foundations of the social order and of our democracy. And history has shown us that."
But Fauci, who left government work at the end of last year, was a noted distributor of untruths throughout the pandemic.
Former CDC director Robert Redfield testified in March that Fauci's suppression of the Covid-19 lab-leak theory was "antithetical to science."
Redfield testified that he had he said he had several calls with Fauci, WHO chief scientist Jeremy Farrar, and WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in which he "expressed as a clinical virologist that I felt it was not scientifically plausible that this virus went from a bat to humans and became one of the most infectious viruses that we have in humans."
He posited that he was excluded from later calls with the trio "because it was told to me that they wanted a single narrative and that I obviously had a different point of view."
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic revealed days earlier that Fauci "prompted" a scientific study in February 2020 that purported to debunk the lab-leak theory. A memo from the committee suggests "the authors of this paper skewed available evidence to achieve that goal, and Dr. Jeremy Farrar went uncredited despite significant involvement."
On February 1, Fauci held a call with several scientists to discuss the origins of the virus. During the call, a group of evolutionary virologists suggested that Covid may have stemmed from a lab accident and may have been genetically engineered, according to the memo.
Just three days later, four of the experts who attended that meeting wrote a paper, later published in Nature Medicine, that argued Covid had "mutations" that supported the explanation that it had been transmitted to humans from animals.
Fauci has also been criticized for repeated flip-flopping on his support for vaccine mandates and the effectiveness of masks.
"There's no reason to be walking around with a mask," he said in March 2020 before later switching positions. "When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences - people keep fiddling with the mask, and they keep touching their face."
Fauci explained his initial hesitation on masks by saying that people in the public-health community were trying to preserve masks for front-line workers.
He later advocated for mask-wearing in schools despite concerns that long-term mask-wearing can cause physical and developmental issues in children and that there was little evidence to support a mandate.
Fauci has previously claimed that attacks on him "are attacks on science."
"All of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning have been fundamentally based on science," Fauci said during an interview with NBC's Chuck Todd in June. "Sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people and there was pushback against me, so if you are trying to, you know, get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you're really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you're attacking science."
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