At a recent hearing of a subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee that deals specifically with issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Democratic members provided systematic rebuttals to falsehoods both directly and more distantly related to the global health crisis.
On the latter front, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who is a member of the subcommittee, complained during that very hearing about the reach of misleading claims she’d posted online about deaths ostensibly connected to COVID-19 vaccinations. She has represented data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) as more conclusive than it actually is. The actual nature of that data is that it’s extremely wide in scope and collects information about events that are close in time but might have absolutely nothing to do with the shots.
In general, conservatives also like to spread a deceptive conspiracy theory that their viewpoints face some kind of systematic suppression online. There remains no evidence of this, with conservative content doing consistently very well on various platforms. And in general, the spread of deception about something as substantial as the virus can connect to actual deaths. “A May 2022 Brown University Study found that this sort of abuse of free speech contributed to approximately 319,000 preventable deaths,” Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) said during the proceedings in reference to some of these lies.
Another Democratic member of the panel also helped outline how various public health measures implemented during the pandemic were actually closely in line with the Constitution.
“My Republican colleagues have suggested that public health officials systematically and intentionally acted in defiance of the Constitution during the pandemic. This simply is not the case,” Rep. Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) said. “In fact, the overwhelming majority of pandemic-era public health policies—be they suspensions of in-person gatherings or vaccination and masking requirements—have been upheld by the courts. On free speech grounds, they have been upheld for meeting the standard of viewpoint neutrality. And on free exercise grounds, they’ve been upheld for satisfying the neutral and general applicability standard put forward by Justice Antonin Scalia.”
And elsewhere in the hearing, members pointed out how Donald Trump himself was behind some of the serious chaos that the United States endured. “Out of the gate, Donald Trump and his Administration stumbled,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) said. “They got testing wrong early on, the Administration opted to use testing protocol that contained design and contamination issues that set America back in our early testing, tests were nowhere to be found.” Watch below:
