One wonders why Anthony Fauci, MD, who is no longer a federal employee, would consent to testify at a Congressional hearing when he knows Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan and other Wah Wah Republicans will not actually ask him questions, but will simply use him as a stage prop.
MTG spewed forth a number of complaints:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTSG_xlJvFQ
1/ Science uses dogs in experiments. Beagles (Snoopy) in particular. She may be unaware it was dogs who were sacrificed to discover insulin in 1922, saving a ward of three hundred Toronto children dying of type 1 diabetes, and very quickly saving thousands then millions of other patients with juvenile diabetes.
 |
| Banting and Best discover insulin |
2/ MTG expresses withering disdain that Dr. Fauci first questioned the efficacy of masks but then endorsed masking for children and the general population. Fauci, has, of course, said he was skeptical that masks could be effective, but when scientific studies were complete, it was evident they could help reduce spread of infection, so he said then, "Well, I was wrong. They are a useful tool." But for Ms. Greene the mask is a sort of child abuse, comparable to ritual blood sacrifice.
 |
| Obadiah Youngblood New Hampshire Howl |
3/ Dr. Fauci is shown in a photo held by Ms. Green as he sits in an empty bleacher section with two people, his mask pulled down below his nose while the other two are masked and the stadium clearly nearly empty. This offense is less clear. Is Ms. Greene saying Fauci was hypocritical in pulling down his mask or in recommending avoiding crowds and then going to a crowdless game? Mad Dog did recognize the woman sitting next to him in the picture--it was Dr. Fauci's wife. That Fauci might unmask while sitting next to his wife, who he lives with, did not strike Mad Dog as a violation of mask protocol. Who the man is, is not clear, but this photo hardly looks like a smoking gun. Ms. Greene's wah wah seems to be that stadiums were forced to be empty just to prevent spread of a virus which was projected to kill 3 million people but in the end killed only 1 million, because the intervention of Dr. Fauci and those who worked with him.
4/ Ms. Greene rails about NIH scientists collecting $750 million from patents on medicines and other products they developed while employed by the US taxpayer.
Dr. Fauci has said elsewhere he made $125 a year from a patent on a technology for a lab test he developed 25 years before COVID, but that is not illegal and in fact, he might have added that scientists supported by government grant money not uncommonly set up companies outside their universities to develop and pursue ideas they got while being supported by government grants.
Fauci is not one of those, but this is a murky part of intellectual property law and Ms. Greene appears to be saying scientists should not profit from their ideas if they are employed by the government. She has not, apparently, read "The Billion Dollar Molecule" which describes how miracle drugs which have changed the fates of millions of patients often start in drug companies or universities, but then are driven by the incentive for profit to be developed outside these places.
5/ MTG represents those resentful, seething folks in Rome, GA, who do not have MD degrees and she refuses to address Dr. Fauci as "doctor" because she knows her constituents love that. Any signifier of respect for a title, anything which confers and recognizes prestige as a result of academic achievement is a red flag waved in the face of her down home folks, who haven't a prayer of ever achieving that title. Oh, so you're a DOCTOR, well let me tell you, we don't respect doctors down round these parts, because we know the doctors torture beagles, make children wear masks in school, develop vaccines which save millions of lives, shake their heads when Donald Trump suggests he has a great idea for ending the COVID pandemic by injecting bleach intravenously, and people like MR Fauci should be thrown in jail for all those horrible things they did to save the nation.
 |
| In Georgia, They Love MTG |
Mad Dog remembers Dr. Fauci walking onto a dark ward at two A.M. to talk about a twenty year old woman who was lying in a bed gasping for air. He listened to her heart and then stepped into the hallway and asked the medical student, intern and resident who were standing there trying to figure out what to do for her what they thought her problem was. When they gave their answer, which was wrong, he smiled tolerantly and explained why they were wrong, but he gave them full points for trying, and for holding fast to their post at the bedside and then told them what to do to save her, and then walked off the ward to grab four hours sleep before Morning Report.
 |
| Dr. Fauci |
To Mad Dog's knowledge, Marjorie Taylor Green has never set foot on a ward and saved a patient at 2 AM, or at any more civilized hour, in her entire, brief, ignominious life. Nor has Jim Jordan. Nor have any of the Wah Wah Banana Republicans who argued about "decorum" on that committee, who decided respect was owed not to any witness, but only to other members of Congress.
 |
| The New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center |
As if any of these Republicans has ever done anything which could have earned them even one iota of the respect owed Dr. Fauci.
No comments:
Post a Comment