Former presidential medical adviser clashed with far-right congresswoman when he testified in front of the House Oversight Committee on Monday about the Trump administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic
Dr Anthony Fauci has accused Marjorie Taylor Greene of inspiring death threats against him.
The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases clashed with the Republican firebrand lawmaker at a hearing of the House Oversight Committee on Monday in which he gave testimony about the Trump administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
During the hearing, Greene told Fauci he was “not a doctor” and that he “belonged in prison” for “crimes against humanity” amid heated questioning. She also accused him of experimenting on beagles with disease-causing parasites.
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“Whenever somebody gets up, whether it’s the news media you know, Fox News does it a lot or it’s somebody in the Congress who gets up and makes a public statement that I’m responsible for the deaths of x number of people because of policies or some crazy idea that I created the virus — immediately — you could like clockwork, the death threats, go way up,” Fauci said during an appearance with Kaitlan Collins on CNN.
The citation is in the next paragraph.
In the case of Ebola, it wasn’t the doctors’ safety but their convenience that he was concerned about. In the case of COVID, he prioritized doctors’ safety to the point of lying to the public, which contributed to the spread of misinformation and breakdown of public trust, resulting in countless unnecessary deaths.
When the CDC finally started telling the truth about masks, people were able to start making cloth masks at home and donating them to hospitals. Had he been honest from the start, that could’ve happened much earlier.
The safety of doctors and healthcare workers is very important, but it doesn’t justify breaking public trust. Public trust in science is crucial, and when it breaks down you get people refusing to vaccinate their kids and drinking raw milk and other such nonsense. Honesty is a fundamental part of scientific ethics. What he did violated the Hippocratic Oath.
Ebola can only be transmitted by blood… Other body fluids may cause transmission for a person only if they are already showing symptoms… I’m pretty sure doctors who specifically flew abroad to help with this disease would know this … Quarantining them would likely do nothing
Arguing against a panicked Karen rule which would only hurt the few people actually helping fight this disease sounds like the right thing to do
Fauci is far from perfect but you are basically making the same hysterical claims MTG is doing, albeit without spitting as much, pretending the guy carrying a lighter in his pocket is as much at fault as the idiots in charge (Trump and co at the time) who completely fumbled the response to the worst pandemic in a century… Showing once again, Murica is a functionally a third would country with money
Even if the likelihood was low, the enormous harm that could have been caused by Ebola spreading to the US outweighs a mere inconvenience for a small number of people.
Trump obviously spread tons of misinformation and mishandled everything, and had he not sold the PPE in the first place, there’d have been no reason for Fauci to lie. But I hold scientists to a higher standard of conduct than politicians. When Fauci spoke, he was speaking to the public as a representative of scientists in general, and when he lied and damaged public trust, he did damage to uncountable scientific efforts that will take decades to repair, if it can be repaired at all. That sort of betrayal of trust is a serious offense.
I fully expect every word that comes out of any president’s mouth to be a lie, but I used to trust the CDC, and now I can’t.
By this logic and threshold, the only logical solution would be to isolate entirely… No more flights, no more imports. The current risk of all that traffic is way higher than the risk you are clutching pearls about now
Ok, good luck with that …
Thank you for that clearly good faith interpretation of what I said, but you actually misunderstood me.
The cost benefit analysis of making a handful of people have three weeks of quarantine to add a extra layer of security against a deadly pandemic ravaging the country makes it worth it. The cost benefit of “shutting down all trade” is obviously no longer worth the tradeoff.
By your logic, you should be an anti-masker, since accepting any level of inconvenience to mitigate risk of spreading disease is totally unacceptable and it’s apparently all-or-nothing with no room for middle ground with you.
In fact, fuck lab goggles. Scientists and doctors are super smart and never make mistakes or have accidents so who needs 'em? If you’re going to wear lab goggles, why not shut down the whole global economy while you’re at it, that’s basically the same thing. Right?