Meghan McCain Renews Her Attacks on Dr. Fauci: 'He Clearly Wanted to Be a Kardashian'

With the weekend in sight, the women of The View played the hits on Friday morning as they discussed the GOP's continued attacks on Dr. Fauci. As she's done for the past year, Meghan McCain doubled down on her criticism of the infectious disease specialist, who she insisted has put his desire for celebrity above "transparency" throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. "I don't think people that are uncomfortable with celebrity and don't want to be celebrities pose on the cover of InStyle magazine," said McCain. "If he just wanted to be a scientist — part of the criticism of him going forward is that he clearly wanted to be a Kardashian, as well."

Over the past week, several outlets obtained thousands of Fauci's emails related to the pandemic, including one sent to him from an executive with connections to China's Wuhan Institute of Virology. The emails immediately became a rallying cry for conservatives like Sen. Rand Paul, who claimed that the GOP now has a "smoking gun" in its push to discredit Fauci.

When asked about the GOP response to the email controversy, McCain toed the party line. "I have a much different take on Dr. Fauci. It's been one of the more controversial things of the past year I've done on this show," she said, adding that Fauci "doesn't understand" that people want to know if the novel coronavirus could have occurred from an "accidental" leak at a Wuhan lab. "My understanding is that the Chinese government is testing viruses for other viruses, which is something that we don't do in this country. So, there's a hypothetical situation where an even more dangerous virus could be let out of the lab."

McCain insisted that a few months ago, "if you raised a question" about the origin of COVID-19, "you were treated like Alex Jones with a tinfoil hat on your head," a common conspiracy-marker. "And now, you have Vanity Fair, which is not a conservative publication by anyone's definition, writing huge profiles raising these questions," said the conservative co-host. "We have to understand where the virus originated from if we're ever going to be able to, god forbid, face a threat like this going forward."

"There's a huge crisis in this country with Republicans and Democrats questioning the legitimacy of our institutions and having a lack of faith in the government and the medical community at NIH and places like this because there just isn't a lot of transparency," she concluded. "If there's nothing to hide, then show us the proof and continue the investigations."

Elsewhere on The View... Ana Navarro unintentionally (or intentionally?) shaded Meghan McCain when she said that women of color "can't get away with tantrums and meltdowns and behaving unprofessionally" in the same way that their white counterparts can.

"We just don't have that privilege. There is nothing to me more entitled and more about white privilege than the ability to have meltdowns and tantrums and behave unprofessionally, and still have a job," said Navarro. "When you're a brown person, when you're a Black person, most of us think, 'My butt is out the door in a few seconds,' and so we don't. We behave in a different manner." Just going to leave that there...

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Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.