Former White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci says he still fears someone could kill him one day.
“I still think, deep down, that there is a possibility that someone could kill me,” Fauci said in a statement. an interview with USA Today released Wednesday. “So that’s a possibility I wish I didn’t have to think about, but it’s true.”
Fauci noted that he “has become a target of people with extremist views.”
The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has regularly been targeted by conservatives over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2022, a West Virginia man was sentenced to about three years of arrest after threats to him and others.
“One of the many unfortunate aspects of the outbreak is that it occurred at a time of deep division in our society,” Fauci told USA Today.
“And there was an inordinate amount of unproductive ‘Gotcha’,” he continued. “This side is against this side.”
In another recent CBS interview with Stephen Colbert, the comedian asked Fauci about how he would “diagnose America as a patient right now.” Fauci said Colbert would need a surgeon and not an internal medicine doctor, to which the host responded by asking him what he would say if he were a psychologist.
“There is a certain degree of schizophrenia in the country,” Fauci said. “It’s just that it really is, I mean, how far apart people can be that they seem to forget how similar we are, but we’re acting like we’re so, so different.”
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
