At a House hearing this week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) made a show of opposition to former federal official Dr. Anthony Fauci, who helped steer the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic — ultimately controlled at the time by then-President Donald Trump.
Greene’s mid-hearing antagonism reached such an extreme that she wouldn’t even refer to longtime medical professional Fauci as a “doctor,” insisting instead on calling him “Mr. Fauci.”
“Totally insane that Marjorie Taylor Greene would not refer to Dr. Fauci as a doctor. He’s one of the most brilliant medical minds in the country. She’s a national embarrassment,” remarked fellow panel member Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) on X, the site formerly called Twitter. He also tried defending Fauci during the actual hearing itself.
Characteristically, a key point of contention from Greene during the actual hearing was the promulgation after the emergence of COVID-19 of standards like social distancing. Throughout the pandemic and still, with the worst of it in the rearview mirror, conservatives in Greene’s political corner have taken such standards extremely personally, characterizing COVID-19-related restrictions as unconscionable assaults on freedom, even when the rules amounted to simply sometimes wearing a face mask.
Greene’s complaining in the hearing eventually reached the further point of insisting that Fauci should be criminally prosecuted for “crimes against humanity.”
Some on the far-right have even tried to link him to COVID-19 emerging at all, drawing a link between claims about U.S. federal government funding for foreign scientific facilities and a theory of the virus emerging not from nature but a laboratory incident. Even accepting a lab leak theory is still different from the also sometimes propagated idea that COVID-19 was cultivated and spread intentionally as a “bio-weapon,” something for which it’s simply unclear there’s any evidence anywhere.
Totally insane that Marjorie Taylor Greene would not refer to Dr. Fauci as a doctor. He’s one of the most brilliant medical minds in the country. She’s a national embarrassment. https://t.co/ADdjb57fKy
— Congressman Robert Garcia (@RepRobertGarcia) June 3, 2024
