Congressman Steve Scalise: THE PANDEMIC RESPONSE REPORT

Select Subcommittee Republicans Probe CDC’s Data Secrecy: Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis and House Committee on Oversight and Reform Republicans recently called on CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to produce all COVID-19 data collected over the past year that the agency has hidden from the public.

Masking Science Hasn’t Changed, Just the Politics: Just in time for President Biden’s State of the Union address and following recent polls showing the American people are opposed to mask mandates, Biden’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally updated its mask guidelines.

Democrats Continue to Mask Kids: Contrary to science, many Democrat-led cities continue to mask children in schools and childcare facilities even as mask mandates are lifted for adults nationwide.

Democrats Continue to Mask Kids, Fail to Follow the Science: Contrary to science, many Democrat-led cities continue to mask children in schools and childcare facilities even as mask mandates are lifted for adults nationwide. Young children are less vulnerable to COVID-19 than other demographic groups, yet many Democrat leaders continue to require toddlers and children to be masked. The United States is an outlier in how it treats young people during this pandemic. The World Health Organization explicitly states that “children aged 5 years and under should not be required to wear masks … based on the safety and overall interest of the child.” The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control also doesn’t recommend mask-wearing for children under the age of 12. Between children’s learning loss, loss of opportunities, and social emotional difficulties, the failures of the Democrats and the CDC continue to cause severe harm to children.

Masking Science Hasn’t Changed, Just the Politics: Just in time for President Biden’s State of the Union address and following recent polls showing the American people are opposed to mask mandates, Biden’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally updated its mask guidelines.

Throughout the entire pandemic, Democrats have ignored their own masking rules while forcing children to wear them at school, and even outside on extremely hot summer days. Liberal elites have been spotted without the masks at hair salons, the Met Gala, professional football games, fancy restaurants, and more, while those same hypocritical leaders shamed others who didn’t comply with the mask mandates that they ignored.

The American people see right through Democrats’ masking political theater and will never forget how they played politics with our children by shuttering their schools and masking their faces even as doctors were noting the harm those mandates were causing to our children. Let’s be clear: the science on masking hasn’t changed, just the politics.

Select Subcommittee Republicans Probe CDC’s Data Secrecy: House Republican Whip and Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis Ranking Member Steve Scalise (R-La.) and House Committee on Oversight and Reform Ranking Member James Comer (R-Ky.), joined by Republican lawmakers on both panels, recently called on CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to produce all COVID-19 data collected over the past year that the agency has hidden from the public. Recent reporting reveals the agency withheld critical data on boosters, hospitalizations, and wastewater surveillance. The CDC’s decision to hide data from the public prevented a more targeted response, likely costing lives and causing unnecessary economic harm. This failure to be transparent further erodes the public’s trust in the CDC.

Select Subcommittee to Examine Democrat Lockdowns’ Childcare Crisis: On Wednesday, the Select Subcommittee will hold a hearing on “COVID Childcare Challenges: Supporting Families and Caregivers.”  Throughout the pandemic, radical teachers union and Democrats kept schools closed which perpetuated the childcare crisis. After a full year of closures, a national poll found that nearly a quarter of parents experienced either a school or a childcare closure as a result of COVID-19 in the past few weeks. School closures have economically harmed women and children. Without reliable childcare and without schools staying consistently open, women are not able to effectively re-enter the workforce. In fact, in January 2022, the men’s labor force participation rate was up to 70%, while the women’s rate was up to just 58%.

What They’re Saying

Scalise & Thune: Unmask America’s children – federal government should not be masking toddlers (Fox News Opinion)
“We have dedicated much of our careers to fighting and overturning heavy-handed government mandates. One thing we’ve learned over the years is that when Democrats have power in Washington, they typically use it to impose freedom-restricting rules, whether it be on small businesses, family farmers or innovators. But we’ve never seen Democrats try to regulate the behavior of toddlers – until now. As parents ourselves, we are outraged that the federal government is using taxpayer money to make children as young as 2 years old have to wear face masks. Head Start facilities provide early education services to low-income children through 1,600 facilities across the country, including in South Dakota and Louisiana. The Biden administration is now requiring Head Start grant recipients to mask toddlers at all times – even if they’re outside on the playground.”

The School Shutdowns and Lost Literacy (Wall Street Journal Editorial Board)
“Governments made many mistakes in the pandemic, and shutting down schools was arguably the worst. We’re now discovering the damage as studies calculate the learning loss. Amplify, the curriculum and assessment provider, examined its test data for some 400,000 elementary school students across 37 states. It found a spike in students not reading at grade level, with the literacy losses ‘disproportionately concentrated in the early elementary grades (K-2).’”

The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects (New York Times)
“For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public. When the C.D.C. published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected. The agency recently debuted a dashboard of wastewater data on its website that will be updated daily and might provide early signals of an oncoming surge of Covid cases. Some states and localities had been sharing wastewater information with the agency since the start of the pandemic, but it had never before released those findings. Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said.”

GOP lawmakers demand CDC provide unreleased data on COVID-19 (Washington Examiner)
“A group of House Republicans is calling on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to provide them with unreleased data on COVID-19, alleging the agency’s decision to withhold the information was an effort to ‘control the narrative’ surrounding the pandemic. In a letter led by House Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana and James Comer of Kentucky that was sent to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on Friday, the members cited a New York Times report, arguing the information potentially could have helped states better navigate their response efforts to the deadly virus.”

10 reasons why scientists believe coronavirus originated from lab in Wuhan, China (Fox News)
“Fox News talked to several scientists and investigators who have studied COVID-19 origins, and here are some reasons – science-based and circumstantial – why they believe the evidence points to the global pandemic originating from a Wuhan lab, possibly from a researcher accidentally getting infected during an experiment with coronaviruses and spreading it into the community. “When you evaluate the two theories, it is so overwhelmingly in favor of the lab leak that everything else is just incidental evidence about the details of what happened,” said Richard Muller, emeritus professor of physics at the University of California Berkeley, who has been a strong advocate for the lab-leak theory.”

Republicans pledge to uncover COVID origins: ‘We will leave no stone unturned’ (Fox News)
“Republicans trying to unearth the origins of COVID-19 say they will launch a full-blown investigation – with the support of subpoena power – into the cause of the global pandemic if the GOP takes control of Congress in January. Kentucky Rep. James Comer, the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, said despite the Democrats’ refusal to investigate the origins, Republicans have been still able to uncover important information, such as how Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the White House’s top medical adviser, was aware that NIH was funding the Wuhan lab for risky experimental research on bat coronaviruses and how Fauci ‘may have acted to conceal the information and intentionally downplay the lab leak theory.’ ‘When Republicans are in power in 2023, we will use every tool at our disposal to get answers for the American people and hold accountable those who have shielded the truth,’ Comer told Fox News Digital.”

GoFundMe’s Freedom Convoy decision prompts GOP leaders to call for oversight hearing (Fox Business)
“Republican leaders are calling for a congressional hearing and seeking more information on GoFundMe’s decision to block donations for the Canadian trucker’s Freedom Convoy – arguing that the move amounts to another attack by Big Tech on free speech. ‘We are concerned about the growing trend of Big Tech’s increasing refusal to permit a level playing field in the marketplace of ideas, instead actively censoring conservative viewpoints while promoting far-left causes, especially where millions of dollars in crowdsourced funds are potentially misappropriated,’ read a letter from House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., and House Oversight Committee ranking member James Comer, R-Ky. Sent Thursday afternoon, the letter asked Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Majority Whip James Clyburn, R-S.C., for a hearing examining GoFundMe’s decision and the ‘evolution of its policies on diverting donated funds to other causes deemed by the company to be ‘credible and established.’”

House Republican Whip and Select Subcommittee Ranking Member Steve Scalise (R-La.) blasts Democrats’ mask political theater.

Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) calls for the House to return to normal.

Oversight Committee Ranking Member James Comer (R-Ky.) pledges Republicans will continue to investigate COVID origins in 2023.

Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) calls for the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance to be held accountable.