Fauci Aide To Retire After Report Outs Him As RedState's Infamous Coronavirus Denier

An internal communications staffer at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases the federal agency headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci said he will retire after a news report outed him as a right-wing blogger who alleged the coronavirus crisis is a “massive fraud.” 

Bill Crews has announced “his intention to retire,” NIAID spokesperson Kathy Stover told HuffPost in an email Tuesday. News of the decision followed a Daily Beast report published Monday that unmasked him as “streiff,” the pseudonym he uses on Twitter and conservative blog RedState, which he was secretly managing.

In his tweets and RedState blog posts, Crews regularly bashes Fauci, the top infectious disease expert on the White House coronavirus task force, and the government’s response to a pandemic he characterized as a “scare.”

In several writings, Crews called Fauci “attention-grubbing and media-whoring,” and a “mask nazi” for urging Americans to wear face masks to prevent the spread of the virus. He’s called mask-wearing, a practice considered by public health experts to be essential during the pandemic, “a pseudo-religious cult.”

In a June post for RedState, Crews suggested government officials responsible for the country’s coronavirus response should be executed.

“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,” Crews wrote.

“If there were justice,” he added, “we’d send [a] few dozen of these fascists to the gallows and gibbet their tarred bodies in chains until they fall apart.”

NIAID’s Stover confirmed Daily Beast’s reporting is “accurate,” except for identifying Crews as a press officer for the institute. Crews, in fact, worked for the internal communications department, she said.

“Beyond that, I can’t offer any other details as it is now a personnel matter,” Stover added.

Crews has worked for NIAID since 2007. According to his RedState profile, he has been involved with the site since 2004. 

There have been more than 6.8 million confirmed cases of the virus in the U.S. and nearly 200,000 deaths nationwide, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University . Globally, at least 965,000 coronavirus-linked deaths have been reported.

Read The Daily Beast’s full report here .