Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) has a bone to pick with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx of the White House coronavirus task force as Arizona experiences a surge in COVID-19 cases.
In a statement issued Thursday praising the June jobs report, Biggs ripped Fauci and Birx by accusing them of “causing panic” by contradicting President Trump’s “goals and actions for returning to normalcy.”
“Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx continue to contradict many of President Trump’s stated goals and actions for returning to normalcy as we know more about the COVID-19 outbreak. This is causing panic that compromises our economic recovery,” Biggs wrote in the statement. “We can protect our most vulnerable from the COVID-19 outbreak while still protecting lives and livelihoods of the rest of the population.”
Biggs then called for the disbandment of the White House Coronavirus Task Force “so that President Trump’s message is not mitigated or distorted.”
Biggs’ criticism comes on the heels of Fauci warning during his Senate testimony on Tuesday that new coronavirus cases could rise to 100,000 per day.
Last week, Fauci demonstrated that he’s at odds with Trump’s claim that he asked his administration to “slow the testing down, please” during his campaign rally in Tulsa. In response to the President’s testing claim, Fauci told lawmakers during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing that “we’re going to be doing more testing, not less.”
Biggs’ call to disband the White House Coronavirus Task Force echoes arguments he made in a Washington Examiner op-ed published in late April alongside Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO). Biggs and Buck referred to the White House Coronavirus Task Force’s top medical experts as “the dynamic duo of economic destruction” and that it is “simply time for them to be thanked and for them to leave the stage.”
“They have relentlessly relied on admittedly spurious models to scare the nation into accepting unlawful, draconian government measures that may not make anyone safer while certainly taking a jackhammer to the foundation of our once-prosperous national economy,” Biggs and Buck wrote in the Washington Examiner op-ed.
