Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., joined ‘America Reports’ to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic and weigh in on mask mandates.

SEN. TOM COTTON: Not exactly shocking there John. First off, China has been lying and covering up about this pandemic from the very beginning. The World Health Organization's director has been in China’s back pocket from the very beginning when he denied there even was a pandemic. They're the ones that sent the phony commission to Wuhan earlier this year to investigate it. That commission included Peter Daszak , the American nonprofit executive who Tony Fauci used to funnel hundreds of thousands of your dollars to the Wuhan labs. What's clear though is that any evidence about what happened in that lab or witnesses has probably been destroyed. Those witnesses have probably been killed or at least disappeared. It's very unlikely we're going to get a definitive answer— absent of some kind of defector who makes it out of the country. So the real question becomes what will President Biden do to lower the boom on China – old them accountable for unleashing this plague on the world. There's a lot we could be doing that we're not doing.

No John but, first of all, let me say nobody elected the CDC. Nobody elected Tony Fauci to make these decisions. Advisers advise. Elected officials decide. The American people elected Joe Biden and the members of Congress and our governors and state legislatures to make these decisions for us. If you turn these decisions over to a bunch of public health bureaucrats, of course the only thing they're going to consider is what they think is in the best interest of public health. They're not going to balance off interests like whether people can make a living to put food on the table or their kids can learn at school— an integral part of which is being able to see each other’s faces and their teachers' faces, to understand emotion, to be able to see lips and so forth. We're not doing it in Arkansas, either. Our legislature passed a law that prohibits any school from requiring anyone to wear masks. That's exactly as it should be.

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