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.
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?