Dr. Mehmet Oz Asked To Resign From President’s Council, Brings Up Dr. Fauci Again

Anthony Fauci, MD, doesn’t serve on the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition. But Mehmet Oz, MD, still brought up Fauci in response to the Biden Administration asking both him and Herschel Walker to resign from the Council.

Both Oz, who previously had hosted The Dr. Oz Show, and Walker, who was a star running back in college and the NFL, had become Council members during the Trump Administration, being appointed by then-U.S. President Donald Trump. Now, both Oz and Walker are running for U.S. Senate seats as Republican Senate candidates in Pennsylvania and Georgia, respectively. According to Donald Judd and Maegan Vazquez reporting for CNN, a White House official indicated that the Biden administration has a policy that doesn’t allow those running for federal office to serve on Presidential boards. That apparently prompted the Biden Administration to ask Oz and Walker on March 23 to resign:

As you can see, Oz mentioned Covid in his tweet even though he was sked to resign from the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition and not the President’s Council on Covid, Covid, and Covid. He didn’t mention Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), in these tweets, even though some of his previous tweets have been rather Fauci-centric, as I covered for Forbes on February 28. Heck, on Valentine’s Day, Oz tweeted, “Roses are red, violets are blue, Dr. Fauci lied to you. Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone except Fauci!”

If at 5:39 pm on March 23, you were wondering when Oz might mention Fauci again then wait for it, wait for it, you only had to wait less than three hours for it:

Bingo, Oz shifted the topic back to Fauci again, insisting that “The doctor [Biden] should ask to resign is Dr. Fauci, for a multitude of obvious reasons.” His next tweet on the thread indicated that “If President Biden want to politicize health, he will have to fire me”:

As you can see in the tweet above and in the following tweet, some on the Twittersphere responded to Oz’s claim of “politicizing health” with an open the Hatch response:

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​The Hatch Act is a federal law that was passed in 1939. As the U.S. Office of Special Counsel website describes, this law “limits certain political activities of federal employees, as well as some state, D.C., and local government employees who work in connection with federally funded programs.” ​The aim of this law is to keep partisanship out of federal government programs as much as possible. It tries to “to protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace, and to ensure that federal employees are advanced based on merit and not based on political affiliation.​​​​” In other words, the Hatch Act is an attempt to keep politics out of federal government programs.

Oz subsequently responded on March 26 to these Hatch references with another tweet:

This time he claimed in his attached letter that the Hatch Act didn’t apply to him because he was a “’Less restricted’ Special Government Employee.” Once again he mentioned Fauci, claiming that Fauci has repeatedly violated the Hatch Act, even though Fauci has not run for political office. The only example that Oz offered was that Fauci was “disparaging President Trump and praising candidate Biden just four days before the 2020 Presidential election.” He also asserted that “I will consider myself a Council member unless otherwise noted.”

Well, the list of members on the Council’s website no longer includes either Oz or Walker. The White House has already announced that they have appointed Washington Mystics basketball star Elena Delle Donne and José Andrés, a chef and owner of the ThinkFoodGroup restaurant collective, to be co-chairs of the President’s Council. Thus the Council will have two new members, presumably to replace Oz and Walker.

Flroida attorney Ron Filipkowski tweeted out what appeared to be a copy of the letter sent by a member of the Biden Administration to Oz on March 23;

Although it hasn’t been verified whether this was a copy of the actual letter that Oz received, the second to last line did say “Should we not receive your resignation, your position with the Council will be terminated effective 6:00 pm tonight.” That doesn’t quite sound like “hey, you can keep considering yourself to be a Council member.”

So, will this be a George Costanza-like situation? Will Oz do what Costanza did in that episode of the TV show Seinfeld, when Costanza continued to show up at Rick Barr Properties, even though he no longer worked there? Will Oz attend the next Council meeting and say, “OK, what are we talking about in today’s meeting,” and will the co-Chairs respond, “umm what are you doing here?”