Marjorie Taylor Greene Says Not to Worry About COVID: ‘We Can’t Live Forever’

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At least 619,729 Americans, 21,219 Georgians, and 247 people in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s home county have died as a result of COVID-19 since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the New York Times. Apparently, that amount of death and destruction doesn’t worry Greene.

The Georgia congresswoman, who was suspended from Twitter for seven days earlier this week after she once again lied about the COVID-19 vaccines, made an appearance on the network Real America’s Voice to say that the Food and Drug Administration shouldn’t “approve a vaccine that doesn’t seem to be that effective,” which is yet another lie. 

Greene also dismissed the idea that it’s a problem that hospitals are verging on collapse.

“I’ve talked to local hospitals here in my district and here in my state,” Greene said. “Yes, the waiting rooms get full. But guess what? The waiting rooms are full of all kinds of things, not just COVID.”

“Everyone needs to get back down to common sense and needs to remember, we're human, we can't live forever,” Greene said. 

In short, a member of Congress who has a national profile went on television and argued that it’s fine to allow thousands of people to die from a largely preventable illness, while the nation’s hospital systems crumble into dust. But as hospitals around the country are finding, it is not, in fact, fine.

In Las Vegas, a lifesaving surgery for a law professor with stage 3 metastatic melanoma was delayed because the hospital ran out of beds during the area’s ongoing (yet hopefully waning) COVID-19 surge. An 11-month-old Houston baby with COVID-19 was airlifted to a hospital more than 150 miles away last week because there were no pediatric beds available. And in Georgia, many hospitals are already over capacity, to the point where they’re also delaying procedures, denying patient transfers, and diverting ambulances to other hospitals.

Elbert Memorial Hospital in rural northeast Georgia has been able to take in some patients from hospitals in the Athens area, nearly 45 minutes away, in order to help those hospitals deal with the surge. But this week, when Elbert had a COVID-19 patient it had to transfer, the hospital called 20 other facilities and struggled mightily to find a facility that could take the patient in, hospital CEO Kerry Trapnell told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week. “No one had an available bed,” Trapnell said. 

They finally found one, but the patient ended up dying anyway, Trapnell told the Journal-Constitution. 

“It’s sad, and I am not going to imply that the delay cost the patient’s life, but you don’t know,” Trapnell added. “That’s the concern of not being able to transfer patients where they need to go.”