Today, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) joined Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Congressman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), Congressman Andy Harris (R-Md.), Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Mike Turner (R-Ohio), Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and Oversight Committee Ranking Member James Comer (R-Ky.) at today’s leadership press conference to discuss President Biden’s terrible first year in office and his horrific track record during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Whip Scalise called out President Biden for breaking his promise to “shut down the virus” because his vaccine-only strategy ignores therapeutics and other lifesaving treatments and blasted the Biden Administration for listening to teachers union bosses instead of medical experts on whether or not students should return to school. Whip Scalise urged President Biden to find a solution to get students safely back in the classroom and pointed out that keeping children out of school is leading to increased cases of depression, suicide, and drug overdoses.

In addition, Whip Scalise called out House Democrats for covering for President Biden and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by refusing to investigate the evidence showing that the coronavirus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Biden Administration’s disastrous COVID policies. Whip Scalise emphasized that when Republicans take back control of the House of Representatives, they will investigate the origins of COVID-19 and hold the CCP and the Biden Administration accountable.  
On President Biden’s turbulent first year in office:

“Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary since Joe Biden took the oath of office as President of the United States. And even if you were grading on a curve, by all objective reporting, he would get an ‘F’ for failing the American people on all the challenges that we are [seeing] our country face right now.”

On President Biden’s disastrous handling of COVID-19:

“As many of my colleagues here talked about, just start with COVID. This is the signature campaign platform that Joe Biden ran on. How many times during the campaign did candidate Joe Biden say, ‘I’m going to shut down the virus’? He actually bragged that he had a plan on day one to combat the virus. And then what happened just a few weeks ago before governors across the country? He admitted he [didn’t] have a plan. There is no federal solution, and he dumped it on the governors of our [states] because he’s failed over and over again. 

“There was a bombshell report that came out over the Christmas break that laid out that back in October, President Biden was presented with a plan for testing for all Americans all across the country. Seven hundred fifty million tests for everybody to be ready during Christmas because they predicted there would be this surge. They actually saw it coming, and they presented the plan to Joe Biden, who said he was going to shut down the virus as a candidate. And you know what Joe Biden did in October? He rejected that plan. I wonder if today, when Joe Biden holds his press conference to talk about – he can’t talk about any of his accomplishments as president for a year – but he surely should have the opportunity to address whether or not he rejected that plan and why. We’ve posed this to other administration officials. We haven’t gotten an answer yet.”

On Democrats refusing to investigate the Biden Administration’s botched coronavirus strategies: 

“[Oversight Committee Ranking Member] Comer and I asked the heads of the Select Subcommittee on [the] Coronavirus [Crisis] and the Oversight Committee to have a hearing into this testing failure by the Biden Administration. And they don’t want to have a hearing on it. They seemed over-eager to talk about transparency and accountability until all of a sudden, they were accountable for more deaths from COVID under the Biden Administration than they had when they walked in the door.

“And let’s remember, when Joe Biden took that oath of office a year ago tomorrow, he walked in with President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed that had delivered not one, not two, but three proven and effective vaccines. What has President Biden done to advance on that? Nothing. What has he done to go look into more therapeutic options, to look into natural immunity? Again, on testing, the failures that we see where people right now have to wait hours in lines to try to get testing when he was presented with a plan in October and rejected that plan. Kind of hard for him to say now that it should have happened because he was the one who stopped it from happening.” 

On Democrats refusing to partner with Republicans and investigate the origins of COVID-19:

“Are we having any oversight into the origins of COVID? As [Oversight Committee Ranking Member] Comer and [Judiciary Committee Ranking Member] Jordan pointed out, there are reports out there that Dr. Fauci advisors – he’s got a team of advisors – that some of them were suggesting years ago, that over a year ago, that this started in the lab in Wuhan.

“We had a hearing on the Republican side because the Democrats don’t want to have a hearing on this, into the origins of COVID. And every scientist on the panel said when you look at the genetic scheme of this virus, it couldn’t have been created from a bat to an animal to a human. It had to be genetically manipulated, probably in the lab in Wuhan because that’s the only place that they’re doing level of coronavirus research. And yet still to this day, Democrats refuse to have a hearing because they don’t want to hold China accountable.

“If it turns out that they were directly involved and not only having that virus created in the lab, maybe there were taxpayer dollars through gain-of-function research that were involved in that, but also then why China lied to the United States and the rest of the world in those immediate days and weeks and months [afterward] where we could have saved millions of lives globally. But that didn’t happen.”

On a far-left teachers union influencing the Biden Administration’s position on in-person classroom learning:

“And then, of course, as we saw, candidate Joe Biden talk so much about following the science, and President Joe Biden has been manipulating the science. We saw the reports, as [Oversight Committee Ranking Member] Comer talked about, that the teachers union bosses were able to manipulate a report by the CDC on school reopenings.

“Think of how destructive keeping schools closed has been to our young kids over this last year and a half. We’re going to look back years later and say, ‘How did anybody let that happen’ when kids today are not getting the same learning environment outside the classroom as they are inside the classroom. All the science says the kids should be back in school and the – all the things that they’re not learning, all of the damage that’s being done, the suicides, the drug overdoses. And when Joe Biden had an opportunity to stand up for the kids, he instead chose to stand with the teachers unions against those kids and manipulated a report that kept kids out of school.”

On President Biden’s failure to appoint a Food and Drug Administration Commissioner: 

“Joe Biden, still to this day, a year into his presidency, still doesn’t have an FDA Commissioner. And the FDA has been called a rudderless ship in the middle of a pandemic. And he ran on shutting down the virus, and you wonder why it’s not shut down.”

On House Republicans holding the Biden Administration accountable:

“Those are the kind of accountability questions that we’ve been raising. The Democrats don’t want to have accountability and transparency, but when we get the majority, we will. That is going to be something that we aggressively pursue, to get answers to these questions that hopefully Joe Biden will answer later today.”