During a Wednesday hearing of a House panel that deals with questions related to COVID-19, member Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) harshly antagonized minority witness Micah Schwartzman — and the law professor consistently and succinctly reminded Greene of the facts.
After he tried to describe the life-and-death stakes of whether or not to shutter certain portions of society as the virus first spread, Greene accused Schwartzman of essentially accepting suicides by teenagers, which was not what he was doing. (She’d alleged a connection between so-called lockdowns and suicides.) She eventually got to specific complaints about the activities often left unrestricted — or at least less restricted — versus excursions that were placed under closer supervision by the government. She named, for instance, gyms, which were put under sometimes sharper limits for use than liquor stores. She didn’t acknowledge the difference in the nature of physical contact seen at a gym versus what might be seen at other establishments.
“With respect, the risk of the various kinds of activities that you’re describing vary greatly, and public health officials use scientific assessments and data to distinguish those kinds of activities and to regulate accordingly,” Schwartzman calmly explained.
Greene than began complaining about even more, this time discussing her past promotion of misleading claims about data cataloged as part of VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. There is nothing inherently conclusive about a report being made through that source. It’s a proactive center of data collection that casts a wide rhetorical net, gathering information on anything even barely concurrent to a vaccination to uncover problems, though Greene and others have tried to turn deaths reported as part of that data into some broader point anyway.
Schwartzman explained that there’s been no conclusive showing of government coordination with social media companies to censor anybody like Greene was describing the situation. “In fact, there is no Supreme Court decision on this question, and there are, as far as I know, no federal court decisions that have found in any kind of final judgment or based on any jury verdict any kind of collusion on the grounds that you’re describing,” he told Greene, who was left predictably stewing.
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