In contrast to Anthony Fauci, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has repeatedly attacked efforts to lessen the spread of COVID and spread factually incorrect information about the virus.
In August 2021, Paul stated in a video that “most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work” and that “cloth masks don’t work” to prevent infection.
YouTube suspended Paul for seven days following these remarks, stating the content violated their COVID-19 medical misinformation policies.
in November, 2021, Paul claimed that: “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection. Trying to shape human behavior isn’t the same as following the actual science, which tells us that cloth masks don’t work.”
This contradicted the results of a scientific study from Denmark, which showed that mask usage helped to mitigate the spread of the virus.
On December 17, Paul said on Fox Business Thursday: “There’s no science to keeping schools closed, and there’s actually no good science to keeping restaurants closed, in fact there’s no good science that anything we’ve done has changed the trajectory” of the pandemic.
“Every one of the mandates—and you look in country after country, state after state—you look at when the mask mandates went in—the incidents went up exponentially after the mandates. Restaurants, nobody can eat in a restaurant, there’s no science behind any of that,” Paul told Breitbart News at the Turning Point USA convention.
Anti-lockdown demonstration at the Ohio Statehouse
Becker1999 from Grove City, OH, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Paul claimed that high school graduation ceremonies and possibly wedding anniversaries even a decade later would be banned by the government if “we’re not careful” to protect our individual freedoms.
Mocking masks as “face diapers,” Paul said: “It’s like wearing your underwear. You might as well cut your underwear up and wear your underwear as protection. It doesn’t work.
“None of it really makes any sense, and there’s no epidemiological evidence. You know, it’s like, ‘Wash your hands, stand six feet apart.’ There’s no evidence that that slowed down the [spread]. The trajectory of the virus hasn’t been altered at all by any of these things.”
N95 mask
Republicans contend that because President Joe Biden gave Fauci a pardon, he cannot claim fear of prosecution for questions about the time the pardon covers.
But Fauci could theoretically face state or local prosecution, as well as federal prosecution for making any false statements to the panel. And Fauci said he was convinced Paul’s goal was to trip him up and trigger a perjury allegation.
Fauci said in his opening remarks that he welcomed congressional oversight, pointing to the more than 200 times he appeared before Congress over his more than five-decade career with the federal government.
But he stated his belief that this hearing was being held in bad faith:
“Given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’
“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.
“Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”
Anthony Fauci and President George W. Bush
In the days before the hearing, Paul had released more than a thousand pages of Fauci’s personal diary entries and work records. These had been made available to him by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—a notorious foe of vaccines.
Among the diary entries, released by Paul in an attempt to damage Fauci, were those showing Fauci’s growing disillusionment with President Donald Trump in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
These described Trump as “rambling”, “crazy”, “desperate”, “bumbling”, “incompetent”, “an idiot”, “a true embarrassment”, “totally nuts” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent.”
Trump’s lies about the dangers of COVID and his fake cures for it—such as drinking bleach and shining UV light up a patient’s anus—ultimately resulted in tens of thousands of American deaths.
Fauci’s disillusionment with Trump clearly rested on a firm foundation. But Paul obviously believed that Fauci’s disgust with Trump reflected badly on him, not the President.
Fauci blasted the move by Paul as an attempt at “embarrassing and intimidating” him.
As a result, Fauci did not answer a single question from any lawmakers during the entire three-hour hearing, invoking the Fifth Amendment 111 times: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”
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SOCRATES COMES TO THE SENATE: PART TWO (OF FIVE)
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on August 25, 2026 at 12:10 amIn contrast to Anthony Fauci, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has repeatedly attacked efforts to lessen the spread of COVID and spread factually incorrect information about the virus.
In August 2021, Paul stated in a video that “most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work” and that “cloth masks don’t work” to prevent infection.
YouTube suspended Paul for seven days following these remarks, stating the content violated their COVID-19 medical misinformation policies.
in November, 2021, Paul claimed that: “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection. Trying to shape human behavior isn’t the same as following the actual science, which tells us that cloth masks don’t work.”
This contradicted the results of a scientific study from Denmark, which showed that mask usage helped to mitigate the spread of the virus.
On December 17, Paul said on Fox Business Thursday: “There’s no science to keeping schools closed, and there’s actually no good science to keeping restaurants closed, in fact there’s no good science that anything we’ve done has changed the trajectory” of the pandemic.
“Every one of the mandates—and you look in country after country, state after state—you look at when the mask mandates went in—the incidents went up exponentially after the mandates. Restaurants, nobody can eat in a restaurant, there’s no science behind any of that,” Paul told Breitbart News at the Turning Point USA convention.
Anti-lockdown demonstration at the Ohio Statehouse
Becker1999 from Grove City, OH, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Paul claimed that high school graduation ceremonies and possibly wedding anniversaries even a decade later would be banned by the government if “we’re not careful” to protect our individual freedoms.
Mocking masks as “face diapers,” Paul said: “It’s like wearing your underwear. You might as well cut your underwear up and wear your underwear as protection. It doesn’t work.
“None of it really makes any sense, and there’s no epidemiological evidence. You know, it’s like, ‘Wash your hands, stand six feet apart.’ There’s no evidence that that slowed down the [spread]. The trajectory of the virus hasn’t been altered at all by any of these things.”
N95 mask
Republicans contend that because President Joe Biden gave Fauci a pardon, he cannot claim fear of prosecution for questions about the time the pardon covers.
But Fauci could theoretically face state or local prosecution, as well as federal prosecution for making any false statements to the panel. And Fauci said he was convinced Paul’s goal was to trip him up and trigger a perjury allegation.
Fauci said in his opening remarks that he welcomed congressional oversight, pointing to the more than 200 times he appeared before Congress over his more than five-decade career with the federal government.
But he stated his belief that this hearing was being held in bad faith:
“Given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’
“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.
“Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”
Anthony Fauci and President George W. Bush
In the days before the hearing, Paul had released more than a thousand pages of Fauci’s personal diary entries and work records. These had been made available to him by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—a notorious foe of vaccines.
Among the diary entries, released by Paul in an attempt to damage Fauci, were those showing Fauci’s growing disillusionment with President Donald Trump in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
These described Trump as “rambling”, “crazy”, “desperate”, “bumbling”, “incompetent”, “an idiot”, “a true embarrassment”, “totally nuts” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent.”
Trump’s lies about the dangers of COVID and his fake cures for it—such as drinking bleach and shining UV light up a patient’s anus—ultimately resulted in tens of thousands of American deaths.
Fauci’s disillusionment with Trump clearly rested on a firm foundation. But Paul obviously believed that Fauci’s disgust with Trump reflected badly on him, not the President.
Fauci blasted the move by Paul as an attempt at “embarrassing and intimidating” him.
As a result, Fauci did not answer a single question from any lawmakers during the entire three-hour hearing, invoking the Fifth Amendment 111 times: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”
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