Jordan Corners Dr. Fauci on Protests

RUSH: Okay. I mentioned Dr. Fauci. Jim Jordan. This is the hearing today. This is the House Oversight and Reform Select Subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis. Dr. Fauci, who is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director testified. We have three bytes here. These are great. This is representative Jim Jordan, Republican-Ohio. First one, "Dr. Fauci, do the protests increased the spread of the virus? Is that true?"

FAUCI: "Do protests increase the spread of the virus?" Uh, I think I can make a general statement.

JORDAN: Well, half a million protesters on June 6th alone.

FAUCI: Yeah.

JORDAN. I'm just asking.


JORDAN: That number of people, will it increase the spread of the virus?

FAUCI: Cro... crowding together, particularly when you're not wearing a mask, contributes to the spread of the virus.

JORDAN: Should we limit the protesting?

FAUCI: I'm not sure what you mean. (sputtering) Should we...? How do we say limit the protesting?

JORDAN: Well, you make all kinds of recommendations.


JORDAN: You make comments on dating, on baseball --


JORDAN: -- and everything you can imagine.

FAUCI: Yeah.

JORDAN: I'm just asking. You just said...

FAUCI: Yeah.

JORDAN: "'Do protests increase the spread?'" I'm just asking: Should we try to limit the protests?

FAUCI: No. I would think I would leave that to people who have more of a position to do that.

RUSH: Now, why? This is I ask... What's so hard about this for Dr. Fauci? Was it so hard for Dr. Fauci to admit that protests spread COVID? I mean, Jordan zeros in. He says, "You make a lot of recommendations, Dr. Fauci. " Wear the mask, don't wear the mask, socially distance, don't socially distance, don't go to funerals, don't go to church, be very careful if you're dating out there. Be very careful! Can't going to baseball games, can't go to football games, can't open those up yet. School, maybe.

So Dr. Fauci has an answer for whether or not this activity or that should or should not happen in relation to spread of the virus. Jordan says, "What about protests? Protests increase the spread. I'm just asking. Should we try to limit the protests?" And he did not want to say yes. Why? Why was it so difficult for Dr. Fauci to come down on protesting? Who is Dr. Fauci protecting? Who is Dr. Fauci hurting? Why is this so hard?


RUSH: So Fauci on July 24th said that he's avoiding planes and restaurants. On June 30th on CNN: "Stop going to bars, Dr. Fauci tells Americans." Stop going to bars. He's avoiding airplanes, restaurants. But the protest march? (paraphrased exchange) "No, no, no. I don't know. What are you asking me, Congressman?" "I'm simply saying, should people avoid the protests if the protests spread the virus?" "Well, I don't know that we have the conclusive data..."

It was really difficult for Dr. Fauci to disavow the protests.

Okay, I'm gonna go to the phones. We'll play the other two Fauci-Jordan bites in a minute, but people have been waiting a long time.


RUSH: I've got two sound bites here to go of Dr. Fauci testifying today before the House Oversight Reform Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. We already had the sound bite where Jim Jordan is asking Dr. Fauci (summarized exchange), "Well, why should...? You make all kinds of recommendations about dating, baseball. Should people avoid protesting? Should people avoid going on the protest marches, spread the virus?"

And Fauci wouldn't answer.

"I'm just asking. Should we try to limit the protests, Dr. Fauci?" I mean, it was clear... It was a brilliant question, and it was a polite question. It was a legitimate question, just designed to expose Dr. Fauci and his political leanings. "Should we just limit the protests, Doctor? You're worried about all this close togetherness spreading the virus.

"It's a bad thing. It's stressing the hospital system. It's stressing the testing system. So maybe we should try to limit the protests," and Dr. Fauci, rather than being consistent and say, "Oh, yes, I would certainly limit the protests. I would limit close contact with anybody in any way." Instead of doing what would make logical sense, Dr. Fauci said, "I don't know. I -- I think I would leave that to people who have more of a position to do..."


You know, this guy's kind of like Mario Cuomo. Mario Cuomo would tell you everything in the world he thought about how you had to live. He would tell you whether you weren't paying enough taxes or whether you weren't doing this or you should do more of that. When it came to abortion, Mario "The Pious" said, "I do not think I should impose my religious views on the American people," in one of the biggest political cop-outs ever recorded in American politics.

"I don't..." A liberal! "I don't think I should use my own personal religious beliefs and force them on the American people." Fauci's doing the same thing. "Should we limit protests? Should we limit any activity that gets people close together and might spread the virus?" And Dr. Fauci said, "Uh, I would leave that to people who have more of a position. I -- I -- I -- I wouldn't want to impose my opinion of protests on the American people."

I mean, he didn't say that, but that's what he was saying. He didn't go there, folks. He didn't. "I think I would leave it..." Okay. How about you leave it to me to make up my own mind on school, Dr. Fauci? How about you leave it to me to make up my own mind on wearing a mask, Dr. Fauci? How about you leave it to me to make up my own mind on whether or not to get on an airplane, Dr. Fauci?

When it comes to protesting, he was exposed out there.

So there's two more bites between Jim Jordan and Dr. Fauci, and here we go with next one...

JORDAN: It's a simple question, Doctor: "Should we limit the protests?" Governments ought to be limiting people -- and look, there's been no violence that I can see at church. I haven't seen people during a church service go out and harm police officers or burn buildings. But we know that... I mean, for 63 days, nine weeks it's been happening in Portland. One night in Chicago, 49 officers were injured. But no limit to protests! But, boy, you can't go to church on Sunday.

FAUCI: I don't know how many times I can answer that. I'm not gonna opine on limiting anything.

JORDAN: You've opined on a lot of things.

FAUCI: I'm telling you what it is the danger, and you can make your own conclusion about that. You should stay away from crowds no matter where the crowds are.

JORDAN: So you're allowed to protest -- millions of people on one day in crowd yelling, screaming -- but you try to run your business, you get arrested. And if you stood right outside that same business and protested, you wouldn't get arrested? You don't see any inconsistency there?

FAUCI: There's no inconsistency. I don't understand what you're asking me -- as a public health official -- to opine on who should get arrested or not. That's not my position.

RUSH: What a copout. What an absolute copout. "I don't understand what you're asking me. You're asking me political stuff. People get arrested? I'm not..." He knows full well what Jordan's asking him. He's not this obtuse. He knows exactly what Jordan is asking him, and he knows that he runs the risk of major, major hypocrisy if he answers the question. So he isn't gonna answer the question.

Next bite here...

JORDAN: You've advocated for certain businesses to be shut down. I'm just asking you on your position on the protests. We know the protests actually increase the spread of the virus. You've said that.

FAUCI: I said crowds. I didn't say specifically. I didn't say protests to anything.

JORDAN: So the protests don't increase the spread of the virus?

FAUCI: I didn't say that. You're putting words in my mouth.

JORDAN: Nope! I just want an answer to the question. Do the protests increase the spread of the virus?

FAUCI: I don't have any scientific evidence of anything. I can tell you that crowds are known -- particularly when you don't have a mask -- to increase the acquisition of transmission.

RUSH: See? Dr. Fauci wants to go nowhere near answering the question about protests. He isn't going to do it, 'cause Dr. Fauci obviously identifies with the people who are protesting. Why is it so hard to admit, by the way? Why is it so hard for these official government bureaucrats to acknowledge and admit that their politics leans left?

"Well, because, Mr. Limbaugh, they built their careers on the fact that they don't do politics, that they're doctors and nurses and that they're always right in the middle and they don't get bothered by these silly little political things." Oh. Oh. And yet, and yet it's not hard to determine who the avowed pro-leftists in the American bureaucracy are.

Same hearing, sound bite number 13. Let's see. Who's asking the question? Carolyn Maloney, Democrat, New York. "We still don't have a vaccine for AIDS. Ebola took five years. How realistic is a vaccine, Dr. Fauci? Is it dreaming or is it a reality? Are the protocols as safe as they possibly could be as we've always had for vaccines? Could you give us an honest assessment of where our country is in vaccine development?"

FAUCI: I believe it will occur. I think the difference between HIV and coronavirus is so different that I don't think you can compare them because the body does not make a very good immune response against HIV, so it made vaccine development very difficult. Whereas the body does make a robust immune response against coronavirus, which tells us that -- I believe that -- we can get to that goal.

RUSH: Okay. So a lot of people are holding out hope for the vaccine, and we hear various things. It'll be level 3, Phase Three testing toward the end of the year. If we get one, it will happen in the first part of next year. We'll see. I think what's occurring to a lot of people -- and, by the way, I could be wrong about this, and I'm just offering an opinion.

I'm not giving you ontological certitude here. You know what I think? I think an increasing number of Americans are beginning to realize that there isn't anything anybody anywhere can do. There's no magic solution to this in terms of stopping the virus, in terms of limiting the impact. Even if it is hydroxychloroquine, look at the battle that is going to be to get to the point where the people opposing it will stop opposing it.

And there is a huge movement doing its best to discredit hydroxychloroquine. Now, imagine if it is the, quote-unquote, "success story" that we have been told this week it is. And then imagine all of the people doing everything they can to prevent its usage. There are gonna be a lot of people who think that that is what's happening.

A lot of people are instinctively suspicious of government and a lot of people aren't. A lot of people, by the same token, believe everything the government tells them. No matter what it is, they believe it. The authorities, the officials. Whenever the officials, the authorities say anything, they universally accept it. But there isn't a rising tide of confidence among the American people that there's anybody -- doctor, nurse, Fauci, Dr. Birx, whoever, whoever.

It appears that this is something that we're just gonna have to ride out, like we rode out in 1917, '18, and '19, the Spanish flu -- and like has happened with a number of other pandemics. And it's a strange thing, too, because we live in an era where many Americans think that stopping bad things is easy. Doing good things is easy. We have, you know, a number of people in younger generations who think that it's not that hard stop stuff like this.

They don't understand why it's not stopping, why there isn't somebody out there who doesn't have a magic wand to stop this. "We got a flu vaccine." No, we don't. We have flu shots. So, you know, herd immunity is one of the ultimate ways this is going to be defeated, but how long's it gonna take to get there? Not only here, but around the world.

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