Anthony Fauci Does Not Want to Kill Your Pet Cats to Fight Bird Flu
What happened: Frequent misinformation source The People’s Voice (Trust Score: 0/100) is gaining hundreds of thousands of views spreading the false claim that Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is calling for the massacre of millions of pet cats in order to fight bird flu.
A closer look: The claim originated with Sean Adl-Tabatabai, founder of The People’s Voice, in an April 9 video titled, “Fauci Says Millions of Pet Cats Must Be Slaughtered to Fight Bird Flu Pandemic.”
Adl-Tabatabai said in the video that Fauci is “claiming cats are the key to the [bird flu] virus jumping species” and is “hell-bent on using this flimsy excuse to greenlight a mass culling of our beloved pets.”
The video included a clip of Fauci’s remarks at the New Orleans Book Festival on March 28, in which he accurately stated that the H5N1 bird flu “has taken the somewhat disturbing step of infecting mammals, namely cows and cats and other mammals, which means it’s adapting itself more to a human.”
The video generated 183,000 views and 2,300 likes on X in under 24 hours, a total that grew to 318,000 views and 5,100 likes as of April 15 as it spread on other platforms.
Actually: There is no evidence that Fauci made any statement about culling cats.
At no point in his remarks did Fauci suggest that cats needed to be killed to stop the spread of the virus, according to NewsGuard’s review of the full speech, which is available on YouTube.
According to a page on the website of the American Veterinary Medical Association, while it is unclear if cats infected with bird flu can infect other cats, “the risk of cat-to-human transmission is considered extremely low.”
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