Rep. Mark Green, who is an emergency room physician, said Friday on Newsmax that it's "ridiculous" for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to base its guidance on reports from earlier in the year and not based on current data concerning the COVID-19 delta variant.
"Thousands of people are getting vaccinated every day," the Tennessee Republican said on Newsmax's "John Bachman Now." "We have the capability of supercomputing. We can crunch that data in seconds."
His comments come after CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said during a COVID-19 briefing Thursday that her agency's current statistics on breakthrough cases, hospitalization, and deaths were compiled on data from January to June, and don't "reflect the data we have now from the delta variant."
"You know their argument that vaccinated people should be wearing masks is based on a study that's not even been peer-reviewed," said Green. "It wasn't even done with vaccines that are being used in America. So we know that the CDC is making bad decisions on bad data already."
Meanwhile, Green said it is important that people remember that vaccines are also medical procedures, and like any other procedure, they should weigh the risks of COVID-19 versus the risks of the vaccination.
"In elderly patients, the actual risk of COVID is very bad," said Green. "I would recommend in that case, people get the vaccine. Children, very young, if they're healthy, they're not dying from COVID, and it's ridiculous to assert that they are (when) there are risks with the vaccine.
"So if I had a pediatric patient, and I'm not a pediatrician, I'm a New York physician. But with the data that I've seen, I would not get the vaccine in a young child."
Switching back to politics, Green discussed the ongoing attacks from the Biden White House on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his actions concerning the new surge of COVID-19 in his state.
"Everything that the Biden administration is doing is about control," said Green. "It's about control. It's about power and ... for them to bash Ron DeSantis and his decision-making, its simply because they want to beat him if he's the Republican nominee (for president) ... All Biden is doing is posturing to hopefully beat him in 2024 should DeSantis be our nominee."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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