Dr. Ben Carson told Newsmax on Monday that he thought it ''disturbing'' that Dr. Anthony Fauci is questioning a federal judge's ruling to overturn President Joe Biden's travel mask mandate.
''It is disturbing that a government bureaucrat would question the judge, [and] the system of checks and balances that we have,'' Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, former housing and urban development secretary and 2016 Republican presidential candidate, said on ''The Chris Salcedo Show.''
''That is when one branch exceeds its power. We need to be able to protect the people, and if we give unlimited power to the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], or any other executive branch, they can abuse it, and they will abuse it, and we've seen that abuse.''
In an interview on CNN+ over the weekend, Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to the president, took issue with a federal judge in Florida who found the CDC and Biden administration overstepped its authority by forcing people to wear masks while on mass transportation vehicles during travel.
''I was both surprised and disappointed because those types of things really are the purview of the CDC,'' Fauci said in the interview. ''This is a public health issue, and for a court to come in, and if you look at the rationale for that, it really is not particularly firm, and we are concerned about that about courts getting involved in things that are unequivocally public health decisions. I mean, this is a CDC issue, which should not have been a court issue.''
District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, sitting in Tampa, said that the mandate was ''unlawful,'' and that the CDC did not allow proper public comment periods before implementing the ban, a breach of its own regulations.
''It's indisputable that the public has a strong interest in combatting the spread of COVID-19,'' Mizelle wrote in her decision. ''But the mask mandate exceeded the CDC's statutory authority, improperly invoked the good cause exception to notice and comment on rulemaking and failed to adequately explain its decisions.''
Carson said the agency's use of ''narratives'' pushing the benefits of everyone getting vaccinated against COVID-19 as opposed to honestly accounting for natural immunity, are examples of how the bureaucracy can abuse its power.
''What is really disturbing are things like the CDC's unwillingness, for a very long time, to even acknowledge the existence of natural immunity,'' he said. ''And the reason they wouldn't acknowledge it is because then you wouldn't be able to say everybody has to have the vaccine.
''They have these narratives, and they have to fit everything into the narrative, and what it has done is completely destroyed the trust that the people have in government medical facilities, and it's going to take a long time to get that trust back, and that's quite detrimental to us as a nation,'' he continued.
Carson also promoted his new book, ''Created Equal: The Painful Past, Confusing Present, and Hopeful Future of Race in America'' about the racial advances made throughout U.S. history.
''We have really not looked at the real history of racial progress in this country, which is really quite astonishing,'' he said. ''Does it mean that we need to do more?
''But the bottom line is we're the ones who get to decide if we want to build our future on our past failings, or in our great successes, and we need to emphasize the right things in this country and move away from those individuals who are trying to divide us and create hatred within our society.''
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