Transcript (en)

I tell people, Sean, I've been in this business for a little while. I've run campaigns. I've taken a lot of tough stands on a lot of different things and taken heat. But if you take all the incoming fire I've received on everything else but COVID and compare it to what I got for COVID, I got more for COVID. I mean, it was a very, very suffocating narrative. Fauci was being held up as a demigod. If you dissented from him, they were saying you were a quack who refused to recognize science, when in reality, he was the one that was misrepresented. Go back to the lab leak. He didn't want to admit that gain-of-function research was dangerous and that this lab had received funding, and then it comes out of the Wuhan Institute. You go back to some of the mandates. He used to acknowledge that forcing masks didn't work. Then he became a zealot about it and was even attacking me in his diaries because I did an executive order blocking mask mandates from local governments in Florida. He opposed us when we mandated that schools be open for the 2020 school year. And he worked very hard to engineer lengthy school closures in other parts of the country working with those governors. And so, yeah, we did what the data showed, but also the belief that people had a right to make their own decisions, operate their businesses, earn a living, go to school and make the best choices for themselves. So, yes, we bucked Fauci. We took a lot of heat for it. But, you know, that's the job of a leader to do what's right when it's not easy.