On Monday at the White House, press secretary Jen Psaki faced another inept line of questioning from Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy.
Bizarrely, Doocy asked whose “fault” it is that the United States is, as Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health recently put it, moving “the wrong direction” when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic. What does Doocy even mean by asking whose “fault” it is? Does he mean to imply that the Biden administration is somehow at fault for the progression of a worldwide pandemic that began well before they took power? Alternatively, did Doocy hope to get Psaki to deride the unvaccinated? Maybe it was both. Psaki, of course, answered by laying out the facts, undercutting Doocy’s nonsense. The pandemic is and has always been more complicated than a simple question of who’s at “fault.”
Doocy posed the following question:
‘On COVID, Dr. Fauci says we’re going in the wrong direction. Whose fault is that?’
Psaki replied as follows:
‘Well, I would say first what he was referring to is the fact that because there is still a large population of people in this country who are unvaccinated, and we have the most transmissible variant that we’ve seen since the beginning of the pandemic, that more people are getting sick with COVID. Those numbers are not moving in the right direction. I think that’s accurate, and you can see it by data.’
Watch Psaki below:
Doocy: On COVID, Dr. Fauci says we’re going in the wrong direction. Whose fault is that? pic.twitter.com/svCr36nG7G
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 26, 2021
The Biden administration has presided over significant progress in the fight against COVID-19, including the nationwide distribution of millions of vaccine doses. Throughout that time, Republican leaders have pushed back against authorities’ calls for vaccinations — although certain high-profile Republicans have more recently spoken publicly in support of vaccines. Still, the damage was done. The problem is aptly summarized by a comment that Fox News host Tucker Carlson made during an April episode of his primetime show, when he claimed that maybe the vaccine against COVID-19 “doesn’t work, and they’re simply not telling you that.” A direct line could be drawn between this kind of irresponsible, baseless rhetoric and the potentially deadly decisions by certain Americans against getting vaccinated against COVID-19.
