OPINION:
As we enter the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become clear that President Biden has failed to “shut down the virus” as he promised during the campaign. By not procuring adequate numbers of rapid at-home tests for Americans prior to the holiday season, abandoning his national plan to defeat COVID-19, politicizing the vaccine while pursuing a vaccine-only strategy to the detriment of therapeutics, and undermining science, President Biden‘s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been disastrous. Tragically, there have been more COVID deaths under President Biden than President Trump. Yet, Democrats on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis refuse to investigate any aspect of the Biden administration’s failed response.
To the surprise of millions of Americans, Vanity Fair exposed that on October 22, 2021, the Biden administration was briefed by COVID-19 experts about the need to increase rapid testing before families gathered for the holidays, yet President Biden rejected the proposal to ramp up testing and deliver more than 400 million tests to the American people, as was presented to him by medical experts.
Why doesn’t Speaker Pelosi and her hand-picked Democrats on the Select Subcommittee want to know why the Biden administration rejected such a proposal, as well as all the names of all the administration officials involved in that costly decision?
After the United States recorded 220,000 COVID deaths in 2020, then-candidate Biden said during a presidential debate that “Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America.” As Commander-in-Chief, Biden has overseen more than 450,000 COVID deaths. By his own logic, should Joe Biden remain President of the United States?
Biden also stated, “Donald Trump still doesn’t have a plan to get this virus under control. His failure to lead is costing American lives.”
Never mind the fact that President Trump had a very successful plan called Operation Warp Speed, which yielded three safe and effective vaccines, multiple therapies like monoclonal antibodies, and a robust nationwide testing network.
But faced with a year of failures on COVID-19, on December 27, 2021, President Biden said, “There is no federal solution. This gets solved at the state level.” President Biden, in the face of his many failures and self-made crises, abandoned his national strategy and decided to blame governors and maintain that COVID-19 is a “state level” problem.
Congressional Democrats routinely requested a national strategy in 2020, yet their silence now is deafening.
We still don’t know where COVID-19 came from. There is considerable evidence that the pandemic started in a lab in Wuhan, China, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) covered it up. House Democrats have not held a single hearing about the origins of COVID-19. House Republicans have been calling for congressional hearings into the origin of COVID-19 so we can finally get answers that the American people expect and deserve, yet Speaker Pelosi and her liberal lieutenants refuse to hold a single hearing on this vital subject.
Instead of listening to scientists and medical experts, President Biden is taking orders from teachers union bosses, who once again are forcing schools to shut down. In the first week of January, more than 5,200 public schools closed their doors for in-person learning, and instead went back to virtual learning.
This is devastating for America’s children.
School districts across the country received billions of dollars in aid from the federal government so that schools could resume in-person learning. There are well-documented medical studies which prove that school closures and ridiculous mask mandates are hurting our children and having a negative impact on their emotional and social development.
Both the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control do not recommend masking kids under six years old. Why is the United States masking young children without evidence? What could be more important than protecting the mental health of our kids?
It’s past time for Select Subcommittee Democrats to hold a hearing about the coronavirus’ origin and the Biden Administration’s horrific track record during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Failing to do so is undermining our ability to learn from those mistakes and represents a major dereliction of duty.
• U.S. Representative Steve Scalise represents Louisiana’s 1st Congressional District and serves as the House Republican Whip. He is the Ranking Member of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. U.S. Representative Mark Green, M.D., is a physician and combat veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. He interviewed Saddam Hussein for six hours on the night of his capture. He represents Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District and serves on the House Armed Services Committee, House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.
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