Republican Senator Blames Screwworm Outbreak on Joe Biden

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) blamed an outbreak of a flesh-eating parasite affecting cows on former President Joe Biden on Monday, claiming migrants who entered the country under his watch brought the virus with them.

Marshall joined Newsmax’s Wake Up America to discuss the multiple cases of screwworm detected in Texas over the last week, just as the USDA confirmed two additional cases on Monday morning. There have been four total confirmed infections, primarily in cows, in the state, marking a resurgence of the disease previously eradicated in the U.S.

Host Sharla McBride asked the senator about the measures put in place to fight the outbreak, noting the concern that it could further spike the country’s beef prices.

“I know you’re on the Senate Agriculture Committee, and beef prices are at an all-time high. There’s new concern about the beef supply now with the discovery of that flesh-eating screwworm among cattle there in Texas,” she said. “But what’s being done to try to contain this new threat and really overall to keep these prices down?”

In response, Marshall claimed that it was Joe Biden who was to blame for the disease’s resurgence before touting the government’s response to screwworm.

“Well, we got this. We’ve been through this before. We eradicated the screwworm in 1966. And we’ll talk about this,” said Marshall.

He continued:

But this is another thing we can thank Joe Biden for that. That when millions of people came out of out of Central America, they brought this screwworm with them. It was on their pets, maybe on their flesh as well. But that’s– we had it contained to Central America. So there’s the good news is we got great treatments for this. Ivermectin works on it. We’ve been through this before, but ultimately, what we have to do is raise more of these worms. Sterile screw screwworm flies is what it amounts to. That a female screwworm fly can only mate one time– now, this is kind of deep here– but they can only make one time, and they die. So what you do is you fill the environment with sterile males to do that, if that makes sense. So we’ve known this for over a year that it was headed this way. We’re making these flies in Central America now, and we have new labs going up in Texas and Mexico as well.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins also blamed the previous administration for the outbreak on Monday, claiming on CNBC’s Squawk Box that screwworm began to get close to the U.S. due to open borders.

“I do think it’s important to note that under the last administration, with a massive movement under the open border policy, the cartels, etcetera, border security, that’s when it began to make its way back up to America,” she said, adding that “not much had been done to push back” before President Donald Trump took office.

Watch above via Newsmax.

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