GOP congressman: Quarantine health officials without pay to 'see how they like it'

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) told a Fox News radio program on Tuesday that he would like to see members of the national coronavirus task force quarantined without pay to punish them for advocating social distancing.

Appearing on “Fox Across America,” Biggs was asked about National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx. He said both should given “the gold watch” and told to “exit stage left” before blaming them for a host of “societal problems.”

From his Fox News Radio interview:

Jimmy Failla, “Fox Across America” host: Are you telling America, basically, it’s time to thank them for their service and let them move on? Are you tired of the lockdowns, is that what this is?

 

Rep. Andy Biggs: Yeah, absolutely, give them the gold watch, and say thank you, exit stage left.

 

It’s time for them to go out and be quarantined without a government paycheck and see how they like that, see how they like it. I mean, really, because that’s what you’ve got.

 

You’ve got two classes of people in America today. You’ve got the people who are the bureaucrats. I don’t want to be critical, they may be lovely people, I simply don’t know them, but I can tell you this: Their policies have produced the division in this country that produced an economic depression in this country.

 

They’ve basically they’ve created societal problems, everything from more suicides, more suicide hotline calls, domestic violence, child abuse, increased use of drugs and alcohol — they’ve basically sanctioned elimination, and if it’s not full elimination, at least a curtailing of, our rights.

 

And basically, they said, we would rather commit economic suicide than have freedom and let people govern themselves and take the risk of freedom.

 

And then we could have put in reasonable policies to protect the most vulnerable. We knew who the most vulnerable was from the get-go. We knew it was the elderly. We knew that it was people with these types of morbidities and health problems.

 

But instead they said, let’s quarantine the healthy as well.

 

Failla: Yeah, it’s crazy.

 

Biggs: Then you also have kind of this kind of quasi-martial law feeling going on.

Though experts say social distancing is necessary to protect both public health and the economy, Biggs has been arguing against it for weeks.

He and Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) co-authored a Washington Examiner opinion piece on April 11, titled “Is Anthony Fauci helping or hurting?” In it, the two argued Fauci and his team “should no longer be the primary voices at the table” and wrote that “Fauci and Birx have indicated pretty strongly that they do not consider the greater needs of the country.”

On April 16, he urged all nonessential businesses in Arizona to be reopened.

“Allow retail shops to open up the way they normally would with social distancing you see in grocery stores … businesses are just dying on the vine. We need to take care of that,” he said. “If you can do it in a grocery store, for Pete’s sake, [or] at a liquor store, then I would suggest you can do it in a furniture store.”

On April 20, he suggested doctors who advocated for social distancing should focus more on the economy than death tolls. “Let’s let the doctors then come back and help revitalize the economy.”

Last Thursday, he claimed those who advocate for stay-at-home orders “fundamentally don’t understand rules of economics.”

At least 7,202 Arizonans have tested positive for coronavirus, according to the state’s health department. More than 300 of them have died.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.