Dr. Anthony Fauci was seen in Tuesday without a mask on in a high-end Washington DC restaurant, despite the city still enforcing a mask mandate.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, was at Cafe Milano in the nation's capitol Tuesday attending a book party for ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl.
Sally Quinn, a novelist who once wrote an erotic novel starring a character inspired by Fauci, said that she noticed Fauci without his mask in the crowd and spoke to him.
Quinn said that Fauci would wear or not wear his mask based on who was near him at the time.
'I said, 'You seem pretty ambivalent about your mask' because no one else was wearing one,' Quinn said. 'He said, 'I just decided that if anyone came up that I didn't know, I would put my mask on.'
Washington's citywide indoor mask mandate doesn't end until Monday, November 22.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases
ABC News' Jonathan Karl launched his new book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show at Cafe Milano on Tuesday night
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, was at Cafe Milano in the nation's capitol Tuesday attending a book party for ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl
About 88 percent of the District of Columbia’s adult residents have received at least one vaccine dose, according to city health officials.
Fauci's reported behavior led to outrage from some conservatives.
Sports and politics commentator Clay Travis called Fauci 'such a fraud and should have been fired months ago.'
Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who called Fauci a 'Democratic communications operative,' echosed that it's 'past time for Fauci to be fired.'
Quinn said that photographers were hounding the event to try and get snaps of a maskless Fauci, who has been heavily pro-mask throughout the pandemic.
Fauci said in mid-October that Covid-19 cases would need to go 'way down' before vaccinated Americans can attend indoor public gatherings without wearing masks.
Fauci told CNN's State of the Union October 9 that the virus was still spreading too rapidly throughout the country to consider changing recommendations on mask wearing.
'It's about 95,000 [daily cases] as the seven-day average. That's still way too high,' the White House chief medical adviser said.
