Fauci: Courts not qualified to rule on public health
White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci last week responded to a recent ruling by a federal Florida judge against Biden’s travel mask mandate by saying that the courts are not qualified to rule on matters of public health.
As reported by Frontline News, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had recently decided to extend Biden’s mask mandate on public transportation, which was set to expire on April 18th, until May 3rd.
But U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle ruled last Monday that the mandate must end immediately.
“Because our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends, the court declares unlawful and vacates the mask mandate,” the federal judge wrote. She added that the mandate “exceeded the CDC’s statutory authority, improperly invoked the good cause exception to notice and comment rulemaking, and failed to adequately explain its decisions.”
But in a Thursday interview on CNN+, Fauci disagreed, suggesting that the CDC should be able to operate outside the law.
“I was both surprised and disappointed,” Fauci said of the court ruling, “because those types of things really are the purview of the CDC. This is a public health issue.”
“If you look at the rationale for that, it really is not particularly firm, and we are concerned about that, about courts getting involved in things that are unequivocally a public health decision,” Fauci continued. “This is a CDC issue, should not have been a court issue.”
The director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases also said that the May 3rd expiration date should have been honored.
“So, we are hoping that the inevitable increase in cases which we are seeing are not going to be associated with an increase in hospitalizations,” he said. “So, all of these dynamic things going on at the same time, it was perfectly logical for the CDC to say wait a minute, we were planning on ending this mandate on a certain date, let’s wait a period of time until May 3, which was a very sound public health decision.”
“Absolutely insane,” responded Rep. Josh Hawley’s Press Secretary Abigail Monroe on Twitter. “Fauci is saying that unelected CDC bureaucrats should be able to impose their will on the country without question or pushback. Just nuts.”
“When Dr. Fauci insists the CDC's decisions ‘shouldn't be a court issue,’ what he's really saying is that a small group of unelected bureaucrats should be able to rule the populace without accountability to anyone,” tweeted writer Scott Morefield. “There are a few words for that, and none of them is ‘democracy’.”
“Someone needs to hand Dr. Fauci a copy of the Constitution of the United States of America,” said Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX).
