House Republicans warn of loss of public trust after COVID quarantine at tense roundtable

The Republican-led House committee investigating the COVID-19 pandemic began its first public event Tuesday, in which several GOP lawmakers blamed Americans’ loss of trust in health officials directly on those who pushed lockdown and vaccination measures.

The House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a roundtable on “Preparing for the Future by Learning the Past,” in which medical experts asked what broad public health restrictions during the pandemic have done to Americans of all ages.

Several lawmakers expressed their dissatisfaction with the Democrats’ guest witness, American Public Health Association Executive Director Georges Benjamin.

“What we have right now is a total lack of trust and trust in the public health sector… and this is due to the coordinated dissemination of misinformation and misinformation that has been driven for political gain, in large part – in many ways – by public health. officials just like you,” Texas Republican Representative Ronnie Jackson said in one of the most tense moments of the hours-long event.

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Texas GOP member Ronnie Jackson told a Democrat witness he was "strange" choice given the loss of confidence in public health officials

Texas Republican Party spokesman Ronnie Jackson told a Democrat witness he was an “odd” choice given the loss of confidence in public health officials. (Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Jackson told Benjamin he was a “strange witness” that Democrats could turn to, given the growing doubt among Americans about the advice of public health experts.

Critics of the COVID-19 response recently seized on a new report published in the medical journal The Lancet this month that suggests that immunity from coronavirus infection could be as strong as the double vaccination required in most aspects of public health. life. for most of the pandemic since the production of vaccines.

Georgia Republican Rep. Rich McCormick compared the distaste for the COVID vaccine at the height of the pandemic to physicians in the 19th century who largely doubted the fact that handwashing had health benefits for themselves and their patients.

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“We’re doing more harm than good – right now we’re treating people with booster shots if you’re immune,” McCormick said.

To Benjamin’s admission that he himself had not treated patients since the 1990s, the Georgia Republican was outraged: “One of the things that bothered me a lot about this pandemic is that people who are “experts” who have never seen COVID patients were telling doctors like me — who have seen thousands of patients — that I can’t speak and that I should be censored.”

Firebrand Georgia spokeswoman Marjorie Taylor Green expressed outrage at her own censorship on Twitter over accusations of spreading misinformation about COVID and said that widespread school closures to slow the spread of the virus are only harming children.

Greene said “children really suffered massively” during the shutdown and “natural immunity is something you should have trusted, but for some reason, all common sense and all knowledge flew out the window.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, Republican from Georgia.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, Republican from Georgia. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The three eyewitnesses to the event – Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kuhldorf and Marty Macari – are part of a small group of medical experts known as the Norfolk Group. Last week, the collective released a plan with recommendations for a bipartisan commission to investigate the “collateral damage” caused by the government’s response to COVID-19.

The plan says the school closures “caused enormous societal damage without significantly reducing COVID-19 deaths or protecting high-risk Americans.”

Rep. Raul Ruiz, himself a doctor and a leading Democrat on the subcommittee, criticized the legality of the witnesses in his opening remarks.

“My concern is that… today’s panelists have a well-documented history of downplaying the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and ignoring the overwhelming consensus of the American scientific, research and medical communities, including by advocating reckless herd immunity. strategies for a deadly new virus that we knew little about, and questioning the vaccine policy that helped avert more than three million deaths,” Ruiz said.

Rep. Brad Wenstrup, D-Ohio chaired a special subcommittee to investigate the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rep. Brad Wenstrup, D-Ohio chaired a special subcommittee to investigate the COVID-19 pandemic. (AP)

“In order to successfully fulfill the responsibilities of this Special Subcommittee, our work must be based on facts and follow science. Anything less would be a waste of our time and taxpayer dollars and a betrayal of the interests of the American people.”

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Since the peak of the pandemic, there have been many studies on the effectiveness of lockdowns.

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