Rasmussen: 46 Percent Want Fauci to Resign

Almost half of U.S. voters think that Dr. Anthony Fauci should resign from his role as the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, according to the latest poll from Rasmussen Reports.

"The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that only 33 percent of likely U.S. voters believe Fauci has told the truth about U.S. government funding for gain-of-function virus research. That’s a decline from June, when 40 percent believed Fauci had told the truth," the survey analysis reads.

• 49% said Fauci had not told the truth about U.S. funding certain research known as "gain-of-function."
• 46% said Fauci should resign from his post at the NIAID.
• 40% said Fauci should not resign from his position.
• 67% of Republicans want Fauci to resign.
• 24% of Democrats said the same.

During a contentious exchange with Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul last July, Fauci said: "The NIH [National Institute of Health] has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology."

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee released a statement from ranking member James Comer of Mississippi claiming that "we now know that American taxpayer dollars funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab," and accused Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins of having "potentially misled the committee and the American people about its knowledge” of what he described as a “cover-up."

According to Collins, the experiments done by the EcoHealth Alliance were unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic and did not cause SARS-CoV-2.

"NIH wants to set the record straight on NIH-supported research to understand naturally occurring bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded through a subaward from NIH grantee EcoHealth Alliance," Collins said in a statement earlier this month. 

"Analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false."

Rasmussen polled 1,000 likely voters from across the country from Oct. 25-26, 2021, with a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.

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