Sen. Ted Cruz is calling Dr. Anthony Fauci a “dangerous door-to-door salesman” in response to a viral video of the now-retired federal health official and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser peddling the COVID-19 vaccine to residents of a Washington, D.C., neighborhood.
“Anthony Fauci isn’t just content to be the most destructive bureaucrat in American history, he also wants to be the most dangerous door-to-door salesman in American history,” Cruz, R-Texas, said Monday on Twitter.
Included in a two-hour “American Masters” documentary about Fauci premiering Tuesday night on PBS, the video shows the doctor and the Democratic D.C. mayor knocking on doors in 2021 in the Anacostia neighborhood of Southeast D.C., a low-income African-American neighborhood Fauci called “disenfranchised” with low vaccination rates.
“The new season of ‘American Horror Story,’” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., tweeted about the video clip from the PBS documentary, likening it to the long-running anthology series on the FX cable channel.
One Anacostia resident challenged Bowser and Fauci, saying he would “definitely” pass on getting vaccinated “because when you start talking about paying people to get vaccinated, when you start talking about incentivizing things to get people vaccinated, it’s something else going on with that.”
“[Your] campaign is about fear,” he said. “It’s about inciting fear in people. You all attack people with fear. That’s what this pandemic is. It’s a fear, it’s fear, this pandemic. That’s all it is.”
The man pressed the two about the vaccine’s unusually rapid development, saying, “Nine months is definitely not enough for nobody to be taking no vaccination that you all came up with.”
“The only reason I’m talking to you right now, as close as we are, is that I’ve been vaccinated,” Bowser said in defense of the vaccine while standing about 6 feet from the man on his front porch.
A woman whose home they visited responded to the duo, saying, “I heard that [the vaccine] doesn’t cure it, and it doesn’t stop you from getting it.”
Fauci lamented “hesitancy” about taking the vaccine.
“It’s so crazy. I mean, they’re not doing it because they say they don’t want to do it. They’re Republicans. They don’t like to be told what to do. And we got to break that, unpack that,” Fauci said.
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