“I’m not in a position to determine what the government can do in a forceful way,” a visibly uncomfortable Fauci, the top infectious disease official in the country, said in responding to Jordan’s questions during the hearing by the House Oversight and Reform Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.
“You make all kinds of recommendations,” Jordan noted. “You made comments on dating, on baseball, on everything you can imagine … you just said that protesting increased the spread. I’m just asking, should we try to limit the protesting?”
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After Jordan submitted news articles for the record later during the hearing, quoting Fauci condemning protests as potential breeding grounds for COVID-19 weeks earlier, the infectious disease expert said:
Like I said, any crowd, any crowd, whether it’s a protest or any crowd in which you have people close together without masks, is a risk. And I’ll stick by that statement. It’s a public health statement. It’s not a judgment on why you’re there in the crowd. It’s a statement related to the fact that you’re in a crowd.