During a press briefing on Monday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) spoke about the COVID-19 pandemic, criticized Trump’s leadership, and slammed House Republicans’ attacks against Dr. Anthony Fauci.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Well, good morning, everyone, and I know we're going to take some questions in a minute.
00:04I'm going to pass it over back to our ranking member, but I wanted just to take us back
00:08to what was really important just a couple years ago, what actually was going on in our
00:13country.
00:14We lost over 1.3 million Americans, the single largest loss of life event in modern American
00:23history.
00:24The economy was crashing.
00:28We're facing a massive recession, businesses were closing, schools were closed, children
00:35were having to adjust to this whole entire new environment.
00:39And at the same time, we had the president of the United States, Donald Trump, giving
00:45out oftentimes horrific and dangerous medical advice, not listening to his advisors and
00:53taking an irresponsible approach, working with cities and healthcare systems.
00:59Now, I was mayor of a community during that entire time, and I remember how horrific that
01:05moment was for all of us.
01:07It's important to remember the stakes and the ability of this committee to actually
01:12do good work, but instead of focusing on how we make healthcare systems better, on how
01:19we improve the process for the next pandemic, because there will be another pandemic, on
01:23how we actually learn and work with our school systems to improve our education process during
01:30these types of medical emergencies, we have done none of that.
01:34Now, for me personally, it's a great offense to the attacks on Dr. Fauci and our medical
01:41professionals.
01:43My mom, who was a healthcare worker, died of COVID during the pandemic.
01:49My stepdad also died of COVID during the pandemic.
01:52I lost two parents during the COVID pandemic.
01:59They would have taken the vaccine in a second if it had been available to them before they
02:08passed away.
02:09And so the attacks on vaccines, on science, on healthcare, on Dr. Fauci, are shameful
02:17and we should all be disgusted by it.
02:20Dr. Fauci is the closest thing that we had to someone taking heroic actions and giving
02:27us good advice and moral clarity during the pandemic.
02:33This whole idea that somehow he orchestrated, this pandemic, this global conspiracy is insane.
02:42And today, the Democrats on the Select Subcommittee are going to push back on every single lie,
02:50on every single untruth, on every single attack on science and the medical community.
02:57And I want to also reemphasize what was said earlier by my colleagues.
03:02The House Republicans on this committee and former President Donald Trump are currently
03:09today causing massive harm to the country.
03:14There's less folks getting their vaccines.
03:17There's more conspiracies around science and the attacks are not helping us prepare
03:22for the next pandemic.
03:25It's incredibly disappointing, but we're going to push back when we go into this committee.
03:29And with that, I want to turn this back over to our incredible leader of this committee
03:32and our ranking member, Dr. Raul Ruiz.