RedState's Infamous Coronavirus Denier Works For Dr. Fauci: Report
A public relations official in Dr. Anthony Fauci’s office has been writing under a pseudonym for the right-wing website RedState, where he pushes disinformation about COVID-19, according to an investigation by The Daily Beast published Monday.
The official is Bill Crews, an employee of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 2007. But he goes by “streiff” on Twitter and RedState, where he is secretly the managing editor, The Daily Beast reported.
Streiff is a COVID-19 troll with around 4,000 Twitter followers. He regularly slams Fauci and the NIAID guidance about how to stop the spread of the coronavirus. According to his RedState profile, he’s been involved with the site since 2004.
“[T]he odds of a mask protecting you from a virus are exactly the same a a chainlink fence protecting you from a mosquito. You wear a mask and leave me the fuck alone,” he tweeted in May, pushing the same mindset Fauci says has helped the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19.
He’s also called mask-wearing “a pseudo-religious cult” and makes a habit of replying to people on Twitter encouraging the practice. “I’m not going to wear one to keep you from wetting yourself,” he’s said.
He’s described Dr. Fauci as “attention-grubbing and media-whoring” and claimed that the pandemic is part of a conspiracy to overtake the country.
“I think we’re at the point where it is safe to say that the entire Wuhan virus scare was nothing more or less than a massive fraud perpetrated upon the American people by ‘experts’ who were determined to fundamentally change the way the country lives and is organized and governed,” he wrote in a RedState post in June.
Neither Streiff nor Crews immediately returned HuffPost’s requests to confirm or deny the allegations. The Daily Beast said it was able to confirm Crews’ double identity through “public records, social media postings, and internal records from the National Institutes of...
