WASHINGTON – Senator Mike Braun today questioned Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on the White House’s COVID strategy. Senator Braun noted that the “top-down” approach from the federal government has not yielded results to justify itself, and that it is time for a new strategy of decentralizing COVID response, putting power back in the hands of local governments, and providing Americans the data to make decisions for themselves rather than telling them what to do through mandates and one-size-fits-all government overreach.
SELECT QUOTES:
“When you wrestle with something of this magnitude, where it’s dominated the conversation for 2 years, and you’re still seeing results equal to or worse than when we started, it begs the question: Do we need to take a different approach?”
“What I’m hearing here today is that there won’t be a real change in approach, and even moreso a doubling down on what for 2 years has arguably not gotten us to a place where we feel better about this and we’re not drowning in anxiety. […] Normally a board of directors, a CEO, would be fired and a board of directors would be questioned as to how good they are, meaning maybe us in the Senate, if they don’t change strategies after results like this. It’s time to decentralize [the approach], and provide the information to the American public to make their own best decisions.”
“I think if you want to regain the trust of the American public, you need to look at a total revamp of how we contend with this virus. If you keep doing the same thing you’ll keep generating the same results, and that’s not the formula for success here.”
