Newt Gingrich on Fox News Channel's Hannity | August 2, 2021

Full Transcript:

NEWT:

Look, they destroyed the Center for Disease Control as a legitimate scientific institution, which was the most important epidemic oriented institution in the world. It's been destroyed. Nobody believes in it anymore. It is all politicized. Dr. Fauci who should retire, even by his own standards wrote an article back in 2012, by the standard of his own article, he clearly should get out of there. Because everything has been politicized. If you can't have accurate honest information, the whole system starts to break down, and that is what is happening. Of course, you have a secondary issue, which is you now have a political aristocracy, the rules don't apply to them. Whether they’re Governor Newsom in California or President Obama or the mayor of Chicago, whatever they tell you to do, you are just a peasant. But they are the aristocrats, and they get to do anything they want to. And I think that is enormously dangerous in a free society. And there is really a breakdown of the contract we've had for 225 years.

NEWT:

Look, what you have now is a mob psychology where in some parts of the country, if you're not wearing a mask and you’re not doing what people want, they will literally come up and get in your face and basically say, you are a traitor and that you don't care about the rest of us. I think it is very dangerous. The fact is, what I tell people is, I think on balance, that you are better off to get vaccinated. Callista and I have had both vaccinations. I think Lindsey Graham will probably report in the future even if you get a variant of COVID, if you have been vaccinated it is a lot less dangerous and a lot less difficult. But I will go back to Dr. Fauci for a second - Fauci spent hundreds and millions of U.S. dollars paying for research at the Wuhan lab. His failure to tell the truth back in January, February, and March of 2020 was an enormous disservice to the country.

It’s an enormous disservice to the American people and it makes you worry about the whole process. That is why I think getting Fauci off stage is a very important building block towards getting back to a rational conversation because he's running around now talking about anything he wants to because it is a celebrity effect. But the truth is he doesn't know any of these things any more than other people do. And his track record the last few years has been worse and worse the longer he's been doing the stuff. So, I think that is a significant part of our national conversation. What did we pay for? Why didn't we get the information? Why do we still not have the information? And to what extent does the United States, ironically, finance the Chinese research that led to a worldwide pandemic? Which if you think about it, it is crazy. It would be a crazy in a novel.