In response to a user who wrote that they were “waiting …… for #FauciFiles,” Musk wrote Monday that audiences could expect to see the information “later this week.”
Having been heavily associated with the government’s vacillating and seemingly arbitrary handling of COVID throughout the course of the pandemic, Fauci has become a highly polarizing figure in the US.
Critics of the COVID policies pushed by Fauci point to a number of discrepancies, including his demand that Americans wear masks after initially insisting “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”
Fauci later claimed that he didn’t actually believe what he was saying, and that he’d been deceiving the US public in an effort to prevent a shortage of masks, but his private correspondence suggested otherwise.
“The typical mask you buy at a drug store is not really effective at keeping out a virus,” Fauci acknowledged in February 2020 email.
Later, Fauci also admitted to manipulating the target percentage of the US population which he claimed would be required to achieve herd immunity.
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” he told the New York Times in December 2020.
“Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” so I went to 80, 85.
One topic likely to be encompassed in any newly-released Twitter files is an October 2020 email by Dr. Francis Collins – then Director of the National Institutes of Health – which ordered Fauci to produce a “quick and devastating published take down [sic]” of the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published by epidemiologists who opposed the strategy of using widespread lockdowns to combat COVID outbreaks.