by Rep. Andy Biggs
Come January, House Republicans will need to immediately reverse the Democrats’ disastrous policies to get our country back in good shape.
My America First Contract outlines a number of areas that help us get there, but one important area that cannot be dismissed is conducting enhanced oversight on harmful COVID bureaucrats. They cannot be let off the hook so easily.
A recent column in The Atlantic suggested that America forgive and forget the healthcare bureaucrats and politicians that violated our rights, exacerbated the effects of COVID and imposed or proposed sanctions that killed people, destroyed lives and centralized power into the hands of government.
After all, the writer pleads, there really was no intended harm. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, confessed to lying and manipulating data for the American public.
“I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection. And I think we overplayed the vaccines,” Birx said.
She and her friends in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), along with President Joe Biden, told Americans that the vaccine protects against the spread of the illness. They also claimed it would keep people from catching it. Birx later admitted in her new book that she manipulated data and quietly altered CDC guidance without authorization to hide information from Donald Trump.
Birx’s friend, the infamous Dr. Anthony Fauci, was also accused of lying to Congress and the American people. A report found Fauci initially resisted a Trump-era order to cancel a controversial research grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology even though he claimed otherwise.
Fauci has also denied his involvement with school closures. However, his own statements suggest otherwise. On at least six occasions, he unequivocally advocated for these shutdowns.
The impacts of the response to COVID will be felt for generations and far more deeply than the actual disease. In this case, the cure may have been far worse than the disease.
The 2020 elections were impacted. The inflation we feel today is largely driven by Biden’s continued demand to put multiple trillions of excess dollars into the economy, long after the epidemic had passed. Some estimate that there is more than half a trillion of fraud in the distribution of relief funds.
Don’t say we didn’t know early on. We knew several things: children were not likely to catch, to be seriously harmed, or to transmit COVID. We knew the elderly were the most vulnerable and needed to be protected more than the rest of the population. We knew that the efficacy of masks was as dubious as decades of studies showed. And we knew that herd immunity was something long accepted in the scientific community.
Don’t say that this is armchair quarterbacking. Credible voices of scientists and doctors, and even some politicians, who declaimed against the draconian lockdowns (that were hypocritically violated by Democrats) were all censored. Those who warned of spiking of mental illness and suicides were hooted off of the public stage.
The police apparatus of the federal government worked with Big Tech censors to cancel anyone who had a different perspective on how to approach the epidemic. And, please, we shouldn’t be begging for COVID amnesty when people of this ilk demanded that people with contrary opinions be silenced, jailed and even eliminated.
Overall, the tyrannical imposition of these guidelines will negatively impact this generation and the lives of future generations.
Unlike the Democrats’ tendency to use Alinsky tactics — #12 comes to mind — I propose truth and accountability. We must prevent the societal and cultural destruction that occurred from ever happening again and that requires we learn from our experience.
The request for an “amnesty” is a typical Leftwing effort to protect themselves from the fallout of their dangerous policies and practices. Nothing to see here, move along.
The Left never wants to be responsible for their inane and dangerous policies. Everyone else gets to pay the price of their malevolent social experiments while the purveyors of their lunacy continue along their path leaving in their wake destruction and ruin.
This is an old ploy by Saul Alinsky and his adherents. For instance, we’ve never gotten to the root of Benghazi, Hillary’s compromising of national security (all the times she did this), the IRS’s attacks on conservative and religious nonprofits, Fast and Furious, Eric Holder, etc.
There cannot be amnesty here as there is absolutely no remorse. The Left is only hoping it won’t be exposed and held to account for its destructive, anti-American policies.
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Congressman Andy Biggs represents Arizona’s Fifth Congressional District and serves on the House Judiciary and Oversight committees.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Andy Biggs” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
Go get ‘Em Andy
&
And Tear ‘Em a New One