Dr. Anthony Fauci insisted the shutdown of churches, schools, and businesses was justified to stop what he called a “tsunami of deaths” due to COVID, though he admitted there was no scientific evidence for requiring measures such as six-foot social distancing or masks for children under five.
The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) testified Monday before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, defending his actions and decisions regarding mitigation measures and the experimental mRNA shots many Americans were forced to take.
During his questioning of Fauci, Rep. Michael Cloud, R-TX, recounted the COVID mitigation measures the former chief White House medical advisor supported after the outbreak of the virus. Cloud asked Fauci “to give me a yes or no as to whether you believe these measures were justified.”
When asked about business, church, and school closures, stay-at-home orders, and mask mandates for adults and even young children, Fauci claimed his support for the measures was justified because of the “tsunami of deaths early on,” but then qualified his response with the statement, “how long you kept them going is debatable.”
But Cloud pressed Fauci further.
“Excuse me – mask mandates for children under five? There’s scientific evidence supporting that?” the congressman asked.
“There was no study that did masks on kids before – you couldn’t do the study, you had to respond to an epidemic that was killing four to five thousand Americans,” Fauci argued.
Cloud continued: “Vaccine mandates for employees; vaccine mandates for students; vaccine mandates for military?”
“Vaccines save lives,” Fauci shot back. “It is very, very clear that vaccines have saved hundreds of thousands of Americans and – “
“We’re talking about COVID-19,” Cloud redirected him. “Did or do the vaccines … the COVID-19 vaccine, stop anyone from getting COVID?”
“In the beginning, it clearly prevented infection in a certain percentage of people – but the durability of its ability to prevent infection was not long,” Fauci said.
“And they didn’t stop you from spreading it either,” Cloud asserted, a statement that drew a confused response from Fauci.
“Early on it did,” the doctor said, “if it prevented infection, but what became clear that it did not prevent transmission when the ability to prevent infection….”
In December 2020, Fauci made a spectacle of himself receiving the Moderna COVID shot on national television.
“I feel extreme confidence in the safety and the efficacy of this vaccine and I want to encourage everyone who has the opportunity to get vaccinated so that we can have a veil of protection over this country, that would end this pandemic,” he said prior to taking the shot.
In his exchange with Fauci during the hearing, Cloud observed that, despite Fauci’s own admission that what he and other government officials mandated as necessary at the start of the pandemic had changed, their policies did not:
When the American people look at the certainty and the case of which people lost jobs, they lost livelihoods – I had rural hospitals in my area that did not have a single case of COVID in their rural community that had to shut down and people not get care that they did need for cancer and some passed away because of those kinds of things. And time after time again, people’s lives are destroyed and … once the new data came available, we did not see a change of course … as the science became available, there wasn’t like, oh, maybe we should consider the lab leak theory. Oh, maybe we should consider natural immunity. We never heard this messaging coming from you or from anyone else who stood on the sidelines talking about these things, and it’s left the American people with a tremendous distrust.
Indeed, when provided with Democrats’ support during the hearing, Fauci doubled down on his condemnation of those Americans who refused to take the experimental mRNA shots.
Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, CA, for example, referred to Fauci as “an American hero,” denouncing his critics as “conspiracy theorists.”
In response to the support, Fauci again returned to referring to the mRNA shots as “life-saving interventions.”
“The data are incontrovertible that they save lives,” he said:
You know, some have done studies … Peter Hotez has done an analysis of this that shows people who refused to get vaccinated for any variety of reasons, probably are responsible for an additional two to 300,000 deaths in this country.
Fauci’s repeated outright denunciation of Americans who refused the experimental COVID shots hearkened back to the words of Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup, R-OH, who expressed to Fauci in his opening remarks that the former NIAID director had become “so powerful that any disagreements the public had with you were forbidden and censored on social and most legacy media time and time again.”
“That is why so many Americans became so angry — because this was fundamentally un-American,” Wenstrup said.
