The appointment of Marjorie Taylor Greene to a House subcommittee for the Covid pandemic by speaker Kevin McCarthy has sparked anger on social media.
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic was created by the Republicans to investigate how the Joe Biden administration handled the US response to the disease outbreak.
Ms Greene has been a staunch supporter of the new House speaker. A New York Times article recently cited Mr McCarthy as telling his friend, just days after he won the vote to be the Speaker, that he would “never leave that woman... I will always take care of her”.
The appointment has come under fire as Ms Greene has openly spread baseless conspiracies on Covid and had even recently resorted to an apparent reference to Buffalo Bills athlete Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest and link it, without evidence, to Covid vaccines.
“Before the Covid vaccines we didn’t see athletes dropping dead on the playing field like we do now... Time to investigate the covid vaccines,” the Georgia congresswoman had tweeted.
Ms Greene was also previously banned from Twitter for spreading disinformation regarding Covid.
The appointment is a major boost to the Georgia Republican who was stripped of her committee assignments in February 2021 by Democrats and about a dozen Republicans.
They cited her incendiary behaviour, including advocating the assassination of opponents, voicing support for QAnon and citing bizarre claims about 9/11 and the Parkland school shooting, as reasons to remove her.
One Twitter user wrote that appointing a Covid conspiracist to a subcommittee was a “new low for the GOP”.
“He’d hire an axe murderer to be the head butcher at a supermarket,” said another user.
“We’re doomed,” said one user.
Meanwhile, the California Republican Mr McCarthy, told NYT that “if you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole. When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”
Other Republicans appointed on the pandemic subcommittee are Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz), Michael Cloud (R-Texas), John Joyce (R-Pa), Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) and Rich McCormick (R-Ga).
Democrats still need to name their own members to the subcommittee.
The Georgia Republican’s appointment on the Homeland Security and Oversight committees has been fraught with controversy as well, with many on Twitter saying it was a mockery of the victims of 9/11.
