Paul, Cruz Call Fauci ‘Dangerous’ After Doctor Claims ’I Represent Science’

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci testifies before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee about the ongoing response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington on Nov. 4, 2021. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) are saying Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top medical adviser to President Joe Biden, has become dangerous with his pronunciations after he claimed to “represent science.”

Appearing on CBS' “Face the Nation” over the weekend, Fauci said that Republican senators who have criticized him are in the wrong.

“That’s OK. I’m just going to do my job. And I’m going to be saving lives, and they’re going to be lying,” Fauci said.

“They’re really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous. To me, that’s more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me. And if you damage science, you are doing something very detrimental to society long after I leave,” he added later.

Fauci also specifically went after Paul, lumping him with others he said “spins lies and threatens and all that theater,” and also suggested Cruz should be probed for objecting to electoral results from a state on Jan. 6.

Cruz responded by asserting Fauci himself has damaged the credibility of science.

“Throughout this pandemic, he’s been dishonest. He’s been political. He’s been partisan,” Cruz said on Fox News’ “Hannity.”

Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has come under fire from some senators for alleging before Congress that his agency, part of the National Institutes of Health, never funded “gain-of-function” research in China. The agency acknowledged last month it did fund research that experts say constitutes gain-of-function, which refers to enhancing a biological agent.

Instead of responding to a question regarding whether he was untruthful to Congress, Fauci “just attacked and engaged in ad hominem attacks,” Cruz added.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asks questions during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Sept. 21, 2021. Ken Cedeno/AFP via Getty Images

Paul took to Twitter to respond to Fauci.

“The absolute hubris of someone claiming THEY represent science. It’s astounding and alarming that a public health bureaucrat would even think to claim such a thing, especially one who has worked so hard to ignore the science of natural immunity,” Paul said.

Natural immunity is the protection gained by recovering from COVID-19. Studies indicate the protection is higher than that afforded by the COVID-19 vaccines, though Fauci and other top government health officials have said vaccines provided better immunity, pointing to a smaller group of studies.

Paul referred Fauci to the Department of Justice for allegedly lying to Congress, but no public action has been taken by the department on the matter. Paul and Fauci engaged in tense exchanges during several congressional hearings this year.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who has also worked to oust Fauci, said on Fox that the doctor’s latest remarks made clear he’s “an open partisan.”

“You saw this weekend, he went out and became an open partisan—attacking a sitting United States senator who is democratically elected by the people, as are the other 99 senators—as a—nothing but a bureaucrat, who works for those people who democratically elected 100 senators, attacking him in a partisan way,” Cotton said.

“It is a simple fact that he testified to Congress, by the way, that he did not fund—through his agency—gain-of-function research in the Wuhan labs, making the coronaviruses there more dangerous and more transmissible. Yet his agency has since acknowledged that they did, in fact, did fund that gain-of-function research.”