Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is, by her own admission, a bullshit artist.
At a Thursday hearing on Capitol Hill, the Georgia congresswoman was allotted time to question Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s director of biologics evaluation and research, as he testified before the House Oversight Committee’s select panel on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Instead, she spent five minutes ranting and raving about vaccine-related conspiracy theories—but not before making a startling declaration right out of the gate.
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“I’m not a doctor,” she told Dr. Marks, “but I have a PhD in recognizing bullshit when I hear it.”
Greene’s rambling monologue came in response to Marks’ testimony about the efficacy of vaccines. “It’s estimated in the United States about 3.2 million lives [were saved] and it’s estimated, globally, that COVID-19 vaccines saved over 14 million lives, conservatively,” he said, his data seemingly triggering the representative.
The representative accused Marks and other health officials of pushing COVID-19 vaccines despite knowing about alleged “side effects.” Her tirade about the “vaccine-injured” made mention of “all kinds of injuries, miscarriages, heart attacks, myocarditis, permanent disability, neurological problems,” as well as “heart attacks, strokes, blood clots” reported by patients “forced” into taking the jab.
“People are dying,” she insisted.
Vaccines for COVID-19 are safe and effective; any cases of serious or long-term health problems arising as a result are “rare,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The safety of COVID-19 vaccines has been rigorously monitored and evaluated since their emergency use authorization in December 2020,” the agency has written. “The updated mRNA COVID-19 vaccines for 2023-2024 are manufactured using a similar process to the previous vaccines.”
Notably, Greene did not at any point pose a question to Marks, who once attempted to pipe up, only to be steamrolled over by the lawmaker.
“And now you’ve authorized that children should receive these vaccines and even babies as young as six months old. That is shameful. That is shameful—I’m not asking you a question,” she snapped. “I’m going to continue speaking, thank you. This is my time.”
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), who spoke next, immediately offered an apology to the room. “I’m sorry you all had to go through that,” he said of Greene’s speech. “That was a lot of conspiracy theories and wild accusations, which we know have been debunked by medical science and we should be clear that vaccines work and save lives and they have saved millions of lives in this country.”
Garcia came prepared to counter Greene, trotting out receipts of instances where she had platformed medical misinformation and conspiracies. He displayed a number of enlarged tweets and quotes of hers comparing workplace vaccination policies to the time when “the Nazi’s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star” and claiming that vaccines cause “turbo cancers.”
Garcia then asked Marks, who obtained his Doctor of Medicine and PhD in cell and molecular biology from New York University, to confirm whether COVID-19 vaccines indeed cause “turbo cancers.”
“I’m a hematologist and oncologist that’s board-certified,” Marks said. “I don’t know what a ‘turbo cancer’ is.” He added that researchers have not detected “any increase” in cancer cases related to the vaccine.
