Rosenstein’s sister pushed CDC’s panic button on coronavirus

FPI / March 3, 2020

Vice President Mike Pence, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and coronavirus task force representatives from the CDC and NIH all said during a Monday press conference that the risk of the virus to Americans “remains low.”

That is a far cry from the dire warnings issued last month from a CDC official who is the sister of former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, reports say.

“It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but more really a question of when it will happen,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier said, according to a Feb. 25 NPR report.

Messonnier added that a "significant disruption" to Americans' daily lives is possible.

"We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare with the expectation that this could be bad," Messonnier said.

During his April 2017 confirmation hearing for the deputy attorney general post, Rosenstein had submitted written testimony saying that his sister was "Dr. Nancy Messonnier and that "she is the Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

In 2018, The New York Times linked Rosenstein to a plot in which he agreed to wear a wire to record Trump in secret and then invoke the 25th Amendment, under which a president can be removed for being unfit to perform his duties.

"Rod Rosenstein as we all know definitely worked to undermine the Trump administration, which is oddly exactly what his sister is doing by undermining the more logical and calm message the president’s team has issued on the virus," said an article on commentator Wayne Dupree's website.

Talk show host Rush Limbaugh has said that overhyped predictions about the coronavirus are driven by politics and not medicine.

"It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump," Limbaugh said on a recent broadcast.

Meanwhile, Dr. Drew Pinsky said in a Monday interview on Fox News’s “The Ingraham Angle” that the larger problem with the virus is the panic being spread by the corporate media.

"Essentially the entire problem we are having is due to panic, not the virus," Pinsky said. "I was saying this six weeks ago. We have six deaths from the coronavirus, 18,000 from the flu. Why isn't the message, 'Get your flu vaccine?' "

Pinsky, host of "Dr. Drew After Dark," said the coronavirus impact has been milder than initially projected.

He said that people who are wearing respirator masks are engaged in "panic behavior" rather than preventative measures.

"It is a press-induced panic that will have real consequences. It will not be the virus," Pinsky said.

Free Press International