‘I don’t think you’re the one person that gets to make a decision…’
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Tuesday criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci’s “one-size-fits-all” approach to the Wuhan virus, saying his opinions should not be the “end-all.”
At a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on May 12, Paul questioned the decision of many states to defer to Fauci regarding if and when they should open for school and work.
“I don’t think you’re the one person that gets to make a decision,” Paul said. “We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other side saying there’s not going to be a surge and that we can safely open the economy.”
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, has advocated for a stranglehold on the American people since the outset of the coronavirus panic.
Even as his doom-and-gloom predictions fall flat, Fauci said “the consequences could be really serious” if the nation’s citizens reclaim their right to assemble at church, government, work, and school.
“There is no doubt, even under the best of circumstances, when you pull back on mitigation you will see some cases appear,” he said, arguing that “little spikes” could turn into “outbreaks.”
Many of those predictions have failed to materialize throughout the country.
“I don’t think any of us are certain when we do all these modelings,” Paul said. “There have been more people wrong with modeling than right.”
“We’re opening up a lot of economies around the US, and I hope that people who are predicting doom and gloom and saying, ‘Oh we can’t do this, there’s going to be a surge,’ will admit that they were wrong if there isn’t a surge,” he continued. “Because I think that’s what’s going to happen.”
Fauci said children returning to school in the fall “would be a bit of a bridge too far,” despite evidence that children catch the coronavirus, spread it to adults, and die from the disease in lower rates than they do from the seasonal flu.
For example, the Journal of American Medical Associations Pediatrics study found that only 48 children were admitted to pediatric intensive care units in Canada and the United States throughout March.
40 of the 48 children admitted with the coronavirus had preexisting medical conditions.
Two children died.
During the 2018-2019 flu season, 136 children died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“At the present time, our data indicate that children are at far greater risk of critical illness from influenza than from COVID-19,” the study’s authors concluded, reflecting the findings of the CDC.
Paul worries that the impact of keeping schools closed through the fall will harm students.
“If we keep kids out of school for another year, what’s gonna happen is the poor and underprivileged kids who don’t have a parent that’s able to teach them at home are not gonna learn for a full year,” he said.
Instead of Fauci’s centralized, authoritarian response to the virus Paul suggested that the United States should “look at the Swedish model and we outta look at getting our kids back to school.”
“I think it’s a huge mistake if we don’t open the schools in the fall,” Paul said.