NEW YORK — Fox News defended Jesse Watters on Tuesday after he used the phrase “kill shot” in a speech urging young conservatives to confront Dr. Anthony Fauci in public with a hostile interview.

Fauci, asked about the comments on CNN, said that Watters should be fired “on the spot” but predicted he wouldn’t be held accountable for his language.

Fox said Watters’ words had been “twisted completely out of context.”

Watters, a host on Fox News Channel’s panel show The Five who made his initial mark doing aggressive interviews for Bill O’Reilly, spoke Monday to a group of college and high school conservatives. His audience booed at the mention of Fauci’s name.

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the government’s most visible spokesman on the COVID-19 pandemic, has been the subject of frequent criticism by some Fox News commentators.

Watters said that Fauci should be confronted on the subject of whether the National Institute of Health funded research at a lab in Wuhan, China, the city where the COVID-19 virus originated. He said an interviewer should suggest he lied about the topic — something Fauci has disputed.

“Now you go in for the kill shot, the kill shot with an ambush, deadly, because he doesn’t see it coming,” Watters said.

He suggested an interviewer say, “‘You know why people don’t trust you, don’t you?’ Oh, he is dead. He’s dead. He’s done.”

The interviewer should make sure the encounter is filmed and the footage given to conservative media, Watters said.

“Just make sure it’s legal,” Watters said.

Fauci noted that for two years, he’s been encouraging people to protect themselves against COVID-19 by following good public health practices and getting vaccinated.

“For that, you have some guy out there saying people should be giving me a kill shot, to ambush me?” he said. “I mean, what kind of craziness is there in society these days?”

In a statement, Fox 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 … and his words have been twisted completely out of context.”

Last month on Fox, Tucker Carlson compared Fauci to Italian World War II dictator Benito Mussolini.