Congressman Steve Scalise: THE PANDEMIC RESPONSE REPORT

What’s Important  CDC’s COVID Policies Harm Generation of Children: Select Subcommittee Republican lawmakers have called on CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to provide the scientific evidence for the agency’s COVID-19 guidelines and policies that are causing harm to children’s social, emotional, and educational development. Biden Administration Withdraws Its Authoritarian Vaccine Mandate on American Workers: Last week, the Biden Administration’s Department of Labor formally withdrew its requirement that private employers with 100 or more employees mandate that workers be vaccinated against COVID-19. Biden’s Disastrous First Year in Office: President Biden made bold promises to the American people to defeat the coronavirus, but he has failed at every turn. Relief RadarBiden Administration Withdraws Its Authoritarian Vaccine Mandate on American Workers: Last week, the Biden Administration’s Department of Labor formally withdrew its requirement that private employers with 100 or more employees mandate that workers be vaccinated against COVID-19. This is a win for American workers and Republicans will keep fighting against President Biden’s sweeping vaccine mandates. Americans must be empowered to make their own medical decisions.   Biden BlundersBiden’s Disastrous First Year in Office: President Biden made bold promises to the American people to defeat the coronavirus, but he has broken them. Since President Biden assumed office, he has failed at every turn.
  • President Biden repeatedly pledged to “shut down the virus,” but more people died from COVID in 2021 than in 2020.
  • President Biden promised to deliver a national plan to get the virus under control, but recently he admitted: “there is no federal solution.”
  • President Biden promised to follow the science and listen to the experts, but his Administration sidelined vaccine experts at the FDA and allowed a radical teachers union to dictate the CDC’s school reopening guidance.
  • President Biden promised to improve the availability of COVID tests, but as the holiday season approached and cases began to skyrocket, test kits were scarce and lines were long.
  • President Biden told Americans the vaccine would not be mandatory, but then he issued several authoritarian mandates requiring American workers to be vaccinated.
Democrats pledged to be “forward looking” in their pandemic oversight, yet they continue to limit their oversight to the previous administration. The American people deserve answers, and Republicans will work to get them. This Week in SSOCCCDC’s COVID Policies Harm Generation of Children: House Republican Whip and Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis Ranking Member Steve Scalise (R-La.), House Committee on Oversight and Reform Ranking Member James Comer (R-Ky.), and Select Subcommittee Republican lawmakers today called on CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to provide the scientific evidence for the agency’s COVID-19 guidelines and policies that are causing harm to children’s social, emotional, and educational development. In the letter to Dr. Walensky, the Republican lawmakers outline how the CDC’s school guidance, masking policies, and failure to account for harm to children lack scientific basis and are jeopardizing an entire generation. We have long known transmission among children is low and symptoms are mild for most of them. Yet, the CDC has refused to follow the science and instead has blindly tried to prevent infection at all costs—sacrificing our children’s mental, physical, and emotional health. Republicans on the Committee have been sounding the alarm on the negative impacts these policies are having on our children for nearly two years. America’s children are paying—and will continue to pay—the price for the CDC’s decisions for years to come. What They’re SayingThe Case Against Masks at School (The Atlantic)“Over the past 21 months, slowly and with much resistance, the layers of mythology around COVID-19 mitigation in schools have been peeled away, each time without producing the much-ballyhooed increases in COVID-19. Schools did not become hot spots when they reopened, nor when they reduced physical distancing, nor when they eliminated deep-cleaning protocols. These layers were peeled away because the evidence supporting them was weak, and they all had substantial downsides for children’s education and health … Imposing on millions of children an intervention that provides little discernible benefit, on the grounds that we have not yet gathered solid evidence of its negative effects, violates the most basic tenet of medicine: First, do no harm. The foundation of medical and public-health interventions should be that they work, not that we have insufficient evidence to say whether they are harmful. Continued mandatory masking of children in schools, especially now that most schoolchildren are eligible for vaccination, fails this test.” A Covid Origin Conspiracy? (City Journal)“Now a string of unearthed emails—the most recent being a batch viewed by the House Oversight and Reform Committee and referred to in its January 11, 2022 letter—is making it seem increasingly likely that there was, in fact, a conspiracy, its aim being to suppress the notion that the virus had emerged from research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Anthony Fauci. The latest emails don’t prove such a conspiracy, but they make it more plausible, for two reasons: because the expert virologists therein present such a strong case for thinking that the virus had lab-made features and because of the wholly political reaction to this bombshell on the part of Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health … If there really was a conspiracy surrounding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, Congress should search for it—first, in the still-closed records of the National Institutes of Health and the EcoHealth Alliance. Congress then needs to ask scientists free of outside pressures or conflicts to reassess the probable origin of a virus that has now killed some 5 million people worldwide.” Fox News Special Report outlines fresh questions on what Fauci, government knew about COVID origin (Fox News)“Fresh questions are being raised about what American scientists and federal health officials knew about the origins of the coronavirus and whether conflicting evidence was suppressed and hidden from the public. On Tuesday night’s episode of Special Report with Bret Baier, Fox News dove into the early days of the coronavirus pandemic and explored documents obtained showing that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was warned early on that the virus may have originated in a Wuhan, China lab.” Member MentionsHouse Republican Whip and Select Subcommittee Ranking Member Steve Scalise (R-La.) calls out Democrats’ hypocrisy.

 

 

Oversight Committee Ranking Member James Comer (R-Ky.) blasts the Biden Administration for diverting COVID relief funds to pay for Biden’s border crisis.

 

 

Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) outlines President Biden’s failed COVID response.

 

 

Representative Fred Keller (R-Pa.) celebrates the end of President Biden’s vaccine mandate on private employers.