- Dr. Anthony Fauci and three other top health officials will attend a Senate Health Committee hearing on Tuesday to discuss plans to reopen the United States.
- Dr. Fauci has made it clear that reopening too quickly will result in “needless suffering and death.”
- The hearing will begin at 7 AM PT / 10 AM ET on Tuesday, May 12th.
- Visit BGR’s homepage for more stories.
In recent weeks, NIAID director and White House Coronavirus Task Force member Dr. Anthony Fauci has been the most trusted voice on the novel coronavirus pandemic in the US. We’ve seen him at President Trump’s briefings, on talk shows, guesting on podcasts, and even portrayed by Brad Pitt on Saturday Night Live. But on Tuesday morning, we will see him in a different capacity, as Dr. Fauci and three other US government health officials will testify before the Senate Health Committee to discuss the pandemic and how we should be proceeding.
In addition to Dr. Fauci, the Senate has also called upon CDC director Robert Redfield, FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn, and HHS assistant secretary Brett Giroir to take part in a hearing titled “Covid-19: Safely Getting Back to Work and Back to School.” The hearing will begin at around 7 AM PT / 10 AM ET on May 12th, and you can watch it live in the embedded YouTube video we’ve included below or on the Senate’s website.
We’ll have to wait for the hearing to begin to see what all of the health experts the Senate has gathered have to say about the reopening of the country, but in an email to The New York Times on Monday night, Fauci laid out what would essentially be his message and warning to the people of the United States.
“The major message that I wish to convey to the Senate HLP committee tomorrow is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely,” Fauci wrote. “If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to: ‘Open America Again,’ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.”
The messaging from the federal government has been muddled in recent weeks, to say the least. On one hand, the CDC guidelines make it clear that many of the states that have started the process of reopening their economies have yet to meet the benchmarks that would make reopening advisable. On the other, Trump and many Republican officials have been pushing states to reopen as quickly as possible, eschewing the data.
Further complicating matters, Dr. Fauci is supposed to be in quarantine after being exposed to a person that tested positive for COVID-19, and Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander is going to be chairing the hearing remotely due to being in quarantine himself after one of his staffers tested positive.
