Fox's Jesse Watters flattens 'clown' Dr. Anthony Fauci after Fauci called for his firing over 'more than clear' metaphor: Report

Fox News host Jesse Watters apparently refuses to back down after Dr. Anthony Fauci called for the network to fire him over what he insisted were dangerous, inflammatory remarks about approaching the good doctor about gain-of-function research and COVID-19 origins.

What's a brief history here?

Watters on Monday made a speech at a Turning Point USA conference in which he said that Americans should have no reservations about approaching Fauci in public and filming the interaction while pelting him with hard-hitting questions.

He said, “The kill shot, with an ambush — deadly, 'cause he doesn’t see it coming. This is when you say, ‘Dr. Fauci, you funded risky research at a sloppy Chinese lab, the same lab that sprung this pandemic on the world. You know why people don’t trust you, don’t you?’ Boom, he is dead! He is dead! He’s done!”

“You do that — 30 seconds, it’s all you need. Now you get that footage to us, you get it to Fox ... imagine Tucker Carlson teases that,” Watters added.

In response to the remarks, a furious Fauci said that Fox should immediately terminate Watters from the network.

"The guy should be fired on the spot!" he told CNN's John Berman.

What's happening now?

Watters blasted Fauci on Tuesday, Newsweek reports, saying that he and outgoing National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins are "clowns" for their botched response to the coronavirus pandemic as well as "funding dangerous experiments" and gain-of-function research.

Watters added that he believes blue cities and states will try to shut down schools in response to the Omicron spike.

“To top it all off, [Vice President] Kamala Harris just admitted to the L.A. Times the administration didn’t see any of this coming. Gee, you mean Biden’s scientific brain trust and Fauci and Collins couldn’t foresee any of this? Why am I not surprised?"

He added, "After all, these are the same clowns who thought funding dangerous experiments on that coronavirus ... at the Wuhan lab was a grand idea."

Anything else?

Fox News on Tuesday said that the company stands behind Watters — and made no mention of any disciplinary action, let alone termination.

In a statement sent to Blaze Media, a spokesperson for the network said, "Based on watching the full clip and reading the entire transcript, it’s more than clear that Jesse Watters was using a metaphor for asking hard-hitting questions to Dr. Fauci about gain-of-function research and his words have been twisted completely out of context."