Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is, like so many of his Republican colleagues in Congress, not a serious person, it seems. During a Wednesday Senate hearing about the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, he melted down and targeted Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health with a lengthy rant about the supposed failures of the “nanny state” in the U.S. Fauci sounded fed up with Paul’s belligerence. The Senator has consistently “misconstrued” basic facts of the Coronavirus response, Fauci noted, and Paul has used these misrepresentations of reality as excuses for going on anti-government response campaigns that seem more interested in some vaguely defined, ideological notions of “freedom” and “liberty” than basic reality.
At one point, Paul complained about how authorities like Fauci were supposedly “jumping up and down” and saying that New York has done a “great job” in responding to the Coronavirus. Fauci is not praising and has not praised New York to the exclusion of the obvious problems that have unfolded in the state. He made this clear — he told Paul:
‘You’ve misconstrued that, senator, and you’ve done that repetitively in the past. They got hit very badly. They made some mistakes. Right now, if you look at what’s going on right now, the things that are going on in New York to get their test positivity 1 percent or less is because they are looking at the guidelines that we have put together from the task force.’
Paul subsequently suggested that currently low new infection levels in New York might be because of herd immunity. As Fauci explained, the state has not reached “herd immunity” yet, according to basic data. One might hope that a U.S. Senator making a blustering show of perhaps being better-equipped to respond to the virus than public health authorities would be familiar with this fact, but Paul did not seem to be.
Fauci explained:
‘I challenge that, senator… this happens with Senator Rand the all the time. You are not listening to what the director of the CDC said that in New York it’s about 22%. If you believe 22% is herd immunity, I believe you’re alone in that.’
Check out the video below:
Earlier in the contentious hearing, after reciting data indicating that the death rate in the U.S. is supposedly about on par with the death rates in “less developed” parts of the world, Paul got strangely metaphysical. He claimed that the data raised the “important question” of whether or not “man [is] really capable of altering the course of an infectious disease through crowd control.” He claimed that “statistics” agree that the answer is no, but this entire premise is ridiculous. Although it’s true, as Paul noted, that many countries have suffered “significant” spikes in Coronavirus-connected deaths, the various sizes of those spikes have varied significantly.
Furthermore, to suggest that the dismal outcomes in the United States indicate that “lockdowns” supposedly aren’t trustworthy after all is ridiculous. Some areas of the United States have simply not imposed systematically consistent “lockdowns” at all. This concept is not complicated.