Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick declared that White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci has lost all credibility among policymakers in the state over his past predictions that have not come to fruition.
“He has been wrong every time on every issue,” Patrick told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday’s “The Ingraham Angle.”
As COVID cases surge, TX Lt Gov Dan Patrick says he will no longer listen to Anthony Fauci: "I don't need his advice anymore" pic.twitter.com/8w6mdCpLhN
— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) July 1, 2020
“Fauci said today that he’s concerned about states like Texas that skipped over certain things,” Patrick said of the immunologist who has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984.
“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. We haven’t skipped over anything. The only thing I’m skipping over is listening to him,” Patrick went on.
Ingraham noted that Texas’ surge in confirmed positive cases is being compared by some to the spike seen earlier this year in New York, a comparison Patrick says favors Texas.
“We’ve had 2,424 people die and New York has had over 31,000. Even California has had almost three times as much as Texas, and remember Laura, those two states have been locked down the whole time while we have been open, so locking down doesn’t work,” he told Ingraham. “If it did, those two states would be doing better than Texas.”
Patrick assured Ingraham that Texas officials will follow the science when dealing with the coronavirus, but that Dr. Fauci will not be treated as a valued source of information.
“I don’t need his advice anymore. We will listen to a lot of science, we will listen to a lot of doctors, and Gov. Greg Abbott and myself and other state leaders will make the decision,” Patrick said. “No thank you, Dr. Fauci.”
Patrick’s comments came after Fauci noted the rising infection rates in a number of states while addressing the Senate
“We’ve got to make sure that when states start to try and open again, they need to follow the guidelines that have been very carefully laid out, with regard to checkpoints,” Fauci told lawmakers Tuesday, according to KXAN-TV. “What we’ve seen in several states are different iterations of that, perhaps maybe in some, going too quickly and skipping over some of the checkpoints.”
Patrick’s comments echo those of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who in May told Dr. Fauci directly during a Senate committee meeting that he was not the “end-all” of epidemiology.
“I don’t think you’re the one person that gets to make the decision,” Sen. Paul said on the topic of keeping schools closed and applying a national, one-size-fits-all approach to managing the pandemic. “We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other sides saying that there’s not going to be a surge, and we can safely open the economy and the facts will bear this out.”
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