(The Hill) — Former chief White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci says that he still fears someone may kill him one day.
“I still think, deep down, that there’s a possibility that somebody’s gonna kill me,” Fauci said in 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 the 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 man from West Virginia was sentenced to a little over three years in prison following threats to him and others.
“One of the several unfortunate aspects of the outbreak was that it occurred at a time of profound divisiveness in our society,” Fauci told USA Today.
“And there was an inordinate amount of nonproductive ‘Gotcha,’” he continued. “This side is out against this side.”
In another recent interview on CBS with by Stephen Colbert, Fauci was asked by the comedian about how he would “diagnose America as a patient right now.” Fauci said that Colbert would need a surgeon rather than a doctor of internal medicine, to which the host replied asking him what he would say if he were a psychologist.
“There is a degree of schizophrenia in the country,” Fauci said. “It’s just, it really is, I mean, how far apart people can be that they seem to forget how much alike we are, but we’re acting like we’re so, so different.”