Biggs accuses president of vilifying unvaccinated
Rep. Andy Biggs is accusing President Joe Biden of trying to vilify part of the population based on COVID-19 vaccination status.
“It gets to the notion of what this has been about — and it’s about control,” Biggs, R-Ariz., said Monday in response to a question on Fox News Digital that was fueled by one of his Twitter messages earlier in the day. “Biden wants control. So, his minions, like (Biden’s chief medical adviser Anthony) Fauci was on saying from now on, you’re going to have to wear a mask on the airplanes forever. … This kind of outrageous conduct is a method to try to create an ‘other’ — to create people to hate, to create people to ostracize, that allows them to claim control. To me, it is immoral, it’s disgusting, and it is absolutely sickening to me that the president of the United States would try to vilify people who are trying merely to exercise a health care choice.”
Biggs, who represents Arizona’s 5th District and has served in Congress since 2016, was responding to a White House statement that told unvaccinated people that they are “looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.”
Biggs called the message “sick.” “Biden and his crew want to fear monger their way into dictating your private health care decisions,” he tweeted. “We’re not falling for it.”
In a follow-up Twitter message, Biggs wrote Tuesday that Biden’s strategy is to “vilify the unvaccinated.”
What Biggs refers to as private health care decisions come with some very public costs.
Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has characterized the COVID-19 situation in the United States as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” as those who end up in the hospital with the disease are disproportionately people who have not been fully vaccinated.
Last year, Biggs was criticized by health experts for spreading questionable advice about masks and other COVID-19-related topics.
“There’s no medical basis for what he’s telling people do to and he has no scientific standing to make these statements,” Dr. Lee Ann Kelley, Maricopa County Medical Society president, said at the time.
Some public health officials are calling for restricting who counts as completely vaccinated as omicron spreads.
Right now, the definition applies to those who have received two doses of the mRNA shots (Pfizer and Moderna are now preferred over Johnson and Johnson), and some health care experts are calling for the term to be limited to those who also have received a booster on top of their initial shots.
In an Atlantic article, Samuel Scarpino, a network scientist at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, is quoted as saying that communities with high vaccination rates could still see “the kind of overwhelmed hospital systems that we saw back in 2020 with the early phase in Boston and New York City” because of omicron.