House Republicans ripped Congress’s attending physician, Brian Monahan, as being politically motivated and unscientific in his reasoning to reinstitute a mask mandate on the House floor and office buildings on Tuesday evening.
Members of the Republican conference met with Monahan for more than an hour on Wednesday afternoon, during which time the members grilled him on his reasoning for bringing back the requirement despite Washington, D.C., not being a coronavirus “hot spot,” where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that vaccinated people still wear masks indoors.
Monahan argued that members travel to the city from hot spots, but he did not bring the Republicans around to his point of view. They found him to be acting on bad information, and in a way that could backfire.
“The problem is we told people that if they got the vaccine, then they could take down their mask,” North Carolina Rep. Greg Murphy, a urologist and member of the GOP Doctors Caucus, told the Washington Examiner. “There’s no science that says that the masks do any better against delta. … Unfortunately, I think it’s actually gonna push some people more towards vaccine hesitancy because they feel like we’ve lied to them.”
HOUSE REPUBLICANS RAGE AND DISOBEY RETURN OF MASK MANDATE
At the core of Republicans’ outrage was that Monahan, they said, was not aware that the CDC guidance that prompted an update was based, in part, on a study from India that has not been peer-reviewed and that he did not read the underlying studies.
“He said he used the CDC recommendation [based] on a report that hasn’t been printed yet,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said in a speech on the House floor following the meeting. “He did not know that the report is based upon India about a vaccine that’s not approved in America. And now, he did not know that it didn’t even pass peer review. That’s why vaccinated people in this House now have to wear a mask. There is no science.”
He added that the vaccination rate for members of Congress is over 85%, and that the transmission rate for the Capitol campus is less than 1%.
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had a more blunt review of Monahan coming out of the meeting: “It’s all bulls***,” she told reporters.
Earlier on Wednesday, some Republicans revolted against the mask mandate by going without face coverings on the House floor, facing fines of at least $500 for doing so. Reps. Chip Roy of Texas and Jody Hice of Georgia called motions to adjourn, forcing all members to come to the floor to vote, as another form of protest.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly said that she has no role in making decisions regarding mask-wearing in the Capitol complex, leaving that to Monahan. But Republicans believe the move is influenced by Democrats’ control over the House.
Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, previously White House physician to former President Donald Trump, said that Monahan has “been political in his decision-making, and not really objective and not coming at things from a clinical standpoint.”
Others pointed out that the Senate has no such mask mandate.
“Why a body that is, on average, far younger than a body that is located a couple 100 meters to the north of us that has no such mandates on its floor just by its more at-risk demographic — it’s politics,” said Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer.
Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert said that Monahan did not wear a mask while talking to the Republican members.
“He’s also sitting there, unmasked, and saying he’s under the ‘recognition rule,’” Boebert said, a rule on the House floor that allows recognized members to temporarily remove their masks. In the meeting room, she said, “there is no recognition rule to remove your mask, and the CDC does not have a recognition rule. That is a political rule by Democrats, by the speaker of the House.”
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McCarthy, who Pelosi earlier in the day called a “moron” for questioning the scientific reasoning behind the mask mandate, accused her of hypocrisy.
“Twice today, I saw the speaker in a crowded room without a mask, less than 24 hours after imposing the mask mandate,” McCarthy said. He speculated: “Could this be a plan to try to keep our schools closed?”
