Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) wants top White House health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci to “voluntarily remove himself” from national TV programs for “fearmongering” about COVID-19 vaccines, the senator said Tuesday.
“Dr. Fauci should be voluntarily removed from TV because what he says is such a disservice and such fear-mongering and almost all of what he says isn’t even matched by the science of his own institute,” Paul told Fox Business host Neil Cavuto.
Paul, who has had numerous public disagreements with Fauci over masking and social distancing requirements for people who have been vaccinated or have already recovered from COVID-19, complained that Fauci and other White House health officials were not sharing good news about viral immunity with the American people.
“Some vaccines like smallpox confer immunity lifelong. Some infections like the Spanish Flu, the influenza that was gotten in 1918, they found people with immunity 90 years later. So, there are people that have lifelong immunity. With SARS, which is another coronavirus that came around in about 2004, they found that those people still have immunity 15, 17 years later,” explained Paul, who is a physician.
For those like Paul himself who have already contracted COVID-19, “there’s a great deal of evidence that you will still have immunity,” he argued. He pointed out that cases of reinfection are rare and that there is no evidence of widespread hospitalizations or deaths from COVID-19 reinfection.
“The good news is that even if you’ve got infected with COVID after you’ve been vaccinated, you have some immunity, you have partial immunity and it lessens the degree or significance of the disease,” Paul said. “Almost everything out there is good news.”
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Fauci and other health experts disagree with Sen. Paul. They point out that researchers have not definitively shown the various vaccines will protect against new variants of COVID-19, such as the U.K. variant, and they advise that people continue to practice social distancing and mask-wearing.
As coronavirus cases spike in some parts of the country, notably Michigan, Biden administration officials are even advising states to turn back the clock to spring 2020 and reimpose lockdown policies to slow the spread of the virus. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said Monday that Michigan, which is currently experiencing the highest rate of new infections, needs to close businesses and shut down the state to slow the spread.
Paul blasted lockdowns as anti-science.
“It doesn’t obey the science. There is no scientific evidence that the lockdowns in Michigan have done anything, or in California. In fact, the daily incidents of the disease in the last two months has been about almost one and a half times greater in California than it has been in Florida. The death rate is lower in Florida. So there is no real correlation between economic lockdowns, mask mandates, or any of this,” he said.
Then he added: “It is television malpractice for these TV doctors to come on and say the mask is so much more important than the vaccine. It’s so much more of an immediate benefit. No, it is not. Most of the people who are getting the disease have been wearing masks. The vaccine work. Almost nobody that’s been vaccinated has been hospitalized or died, almost no one.”
