Rep. Mark Meadows, the ex-White House chief of staff, continued his fierce criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday, wondering aloud why the nation’s top disease expert has been so quiet on the COVID-19 dangers unraveling at the southern border.
“There was no policy, medical or otherwise, that Dr. Fauci wouldn’t weigh in on when President Trump was in the White House,” the North Carolina Republican tweeted. “Curious we haven’t heard from the same Dr. Fauci on Joe Biden releasing thousands of COVID untested migrants into the U.S.”
Meadows was referring to reports of migrants overwhelming U.S. Border Patrol agents along the southern border. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, said at least 2,000 migrants have been released without full information on any upcoming court proceedings, according to WREG.com. He said agents are overwhelmed. The New York Post also reported that 2,000 were released without evidence of submitting to a COVID-19 test.
Border Patrol did not immediately respond to an inquiry from Fox News.
Meadows is not the first Republican to express frustrations with Fauci’s silence on the issue. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., wrote in a letter earlier this month calling on Fauci to use his political sway to stop “a dangerous new foreign pipeline for COVID-19.”
“Hundreds of illegal immigrants” have been released at the border “on nothing more than a promise to appear at a future hearing, the letter said, according to AL.com. He pointed out that “Mexico now has the highest per capita COVID fatality rate in Latin America.”
There seems to be no love lost between many Republicans and Fauci, who they consider a lifelong bureaucrat who made crucial mistakes at the onset of the outbreak. Fauci’s defenders say these Republicans are merely looking for a designated spear catcher after taking a cavalier approach to masks and lockdowns.
Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, seems willing to provoke them, most recently saying in an interview that his decision to push for a vaccine was one of the best decisions he’s made.
Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, took to Twitter shortly after Fauci’s comments, and posted, “If it were up to Fauci we still wouldn’t have a Covid vaccine.”
Trump slammed Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, who both served as key members of his administration’s coronavirus task force, accusing them of “trying to reinvent history.”
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“Based on their interviews, I felt it was time to speak up about Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned,” Trump said. “They had bad policy decisions that would have left our country open to China and others, closed to reopening our economy, and years away from an approved vaccine — putting millions of lives at risk.”
