Energy and Commerce Republican Leader Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Health Subcommittee Republican Leader Brett Guthrie (R-KY) released the following statement about President Joe Biden’s expected plans to extend the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE). Monday, August 15, 2022, is the deadline to decide if the PHE declaration should continue.
“The country is in a very different place as we approach the fourth anniversary of the first cases of COVID-19. The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) even recognized that yesterday. President Biden lacks any good justification to keep these emergency powers with no provided plan to unwind them. His administration has broken people’s trust with heavy-handed mandates, politically influenced school closures, and record-high inflation caused by his $2 trillion spending package, which wasn’t used to fight the pandemic but for political purposes and to pay for things like pickleball courts and luxury apartments. Meanwhile, concerns have repeatedly been raised about the questionable and lack of leadership from Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra.
“For many months, we’ve been calling on President Biden and Secretary Becerra to provide a detailed plan to unwind the COVID-19 pandemic. To date, they have let these PHE deadlines repeatedly come and go without providing this plan. It is way passed time, especially as they also just declared another PHE because of their slow response and failure to get the monkeypox outbreak under control. Instead of clinging to his emergency powers, President Biden should get to work and take seriously the need to rebuild trust and confidence in America’s public health agencies. That starts with being completely transparent to Congress, providing the detailed plan we’ve been asking for, and reining in the reckless spending and federal command and control that is hurting people’s quality of life.”
Original source can be found here.
