Ranking Member Ruiz’s Opening Statement at Select Subcommittee Hearing Examining COVID-19 Policies and Civil Liberties

Washington, D.C. (June 21, 2023)—Below is Ranking Member Raul Ruiz's, M.D. opening statement, as prepared for delivery, at today's Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing examining the implications of COVID-19 policies on civil liberties in the United States.

Opening Statement

Ranking Member Raul Ruiz, M.D.

Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic

Hearing on "Churches vs. Casinos: The Constitution is not Suspended in Times of Crisis"
June 21, 2023

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to our witnesses for being here today.

Three years ago, the world was rocked by a deadly novel airborne virus that has claimed the lives of 1.1 million of our fellow Americans, sent hundreds of thousands to the hospital, and touched every facet of American life.

As we battled this lethal threat, health care workers, public health experts, local officials, and faith leaders worked together to protect the health and safety of their communities.

And because our knowledge of the virus was extremely limited in the early days of the pandemic, we had to act quickly and rely on the public health practices that we knew would help prevent transmission—practices like social distancing and masking.

So, in a moment of crisis, state and local officials across the country enacted these policies with the sole focus on saving lives and reducing harm.

Look, I'm a Christian, a father, a husband, and a physician—I understood and felt the pain that many across our country did when they had to stay home from church, when they couldn't take their children to school, and when they watched the case load, hospitalization rate, and death toll tick up and up every single day.

And so now that we're on the other side of this pandemic thanks to President Biden's leadership in getting the country back on track, I am focused on making sure we won't have to go through what we did last time around when – not if – another pandemic arises.

I want to make sure our churches, mosques, and synagogues can remain safe for in-person worship.

I want to make sure our kids can go to school.

I want to make sure our economy remains afloat, that we save lives, and prevent future harm.

So how do we go about this work?

I can tell you, it's not by relitigating the past.

Or by undermining trust in essential public health tools like vaccines or by making conspiratorial accusations for the purposes of political gain.

No—it's by having an honest conversation here today about what really happened.

It's by providing the full context of how public health guidelines were developed utilizing risk-based assessments that looked at where and how people gather to ensure social distancing and masking measures were implemented neutrally.

It's by learning from the Trump Administration's mistakes in failing to secure PPE, scale up testing, and implement contact tracing that led to the pause of in-person worship, the disruption of in-person learning, and the loss of so many American lives.

And it's by taking the politics out of public health that allowed Trump White House Officials to meddle in public health guidance, drive a wedge between peoples of different faiths, and pressure state officials to prematurely resume in-person worship.

Rather, to do right by every American—religious or not, Republican, Democrat, or Independent—we must focus on developing forward-looking policy solutions that will help save lives in a future pandemic and prevent the societal upheaval we all experienced in its earliest days.

Now is the time to rebuild our public health infrastructure—not knock it down.

So rather than undercutting the lifesaving measures that have put us on the right track, like Democrats' American Rescue Plan, the Biden Administration's vaccine rollout, and the CDC's enhanced emergency response, we should build on these policies to better protect the American people's health.

We should invest in our public health infrastructure and revitalize our workforce so that our hospitals and health care systems are better equipped to respond in the future.

There is much work to be done, and I hope that today's discussion focuses on these objectives.

I yield back.

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