Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul weighed in on the fight against the latest coronavirus surge during a Tuesday interview on “Your World with Neil Cavuto.”
Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto began the wide-ranging interview with a question about Paul’s earlier Senate panel confrontation with Dr. Anthony Fauci and how much the two actually differed on schools opening in the fall.
“It takes a little bit to draw out of Dr. Fauci, but in the end, he did seem to agree with me,” Paul said. “But my point is this: The scientific evidence is overwhelming. The kids rarely get the disease. The kids rarely die from the disease, and actually even more extraordinarily they rarely transmit the disease.”
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The Kentucky senator derided the “political correctness” of the WHO deleting the “link to the studies that pointed out that this was rare.”
“Frankly, many of the schools in Europe are going back without masks,” he said. “Many of them are going out without modified if any social distancing because kids are not causing a spike.”
Acknowledging the “unknown” behind some of the spike in cases, Paul largely dismissed concerns absent an “increased death rate.”
“If you just have cases and the average age is 37 and there is virtually no mortality, you can make the argument that we are increasing our herd immunity for the country,” Paul said. “And so I guess I’m not as alarmed as some. I’m not saying that it is nothing. I was saying we don’t yet know. They say that the death rate lags. That’s true, but we are two or three or even four weeks into a lot of the opening. The increased cases have been going on for a while and I think it is very good news. I think we shouldn’t always have bad news that we talk about.”
“If you look at statistics from the Netherlands, at age 37 or even at age 47, 95 to 97% were either mildly effective or asymptomatic,” Paul continued. “So the odds are good with this disease. We need to not keep scaring people. This is the point with opening schools. They are now scaring teachers such that the teachers don’t want to go back to school and they will refuse to teach. The facts, the scientific evidence are kids rarely transmit this to adults.”
Regarding mandatory masking, the Kentucky senator said: “I’m old enough to remember when the CDC said we were idiots for wearing masks and now they say we are criminals. I think the answer is somewhere in between. I think if you are immunocompromised you should avoid crowds. I think if you’re elderly you should avoid crowds. And I think if you are 20 years old, the same prescription isn’t there.”
Paul finished with criticism of those who mandate restrictions in restaurants, saying there is “just no science to that.” (RELATED: Stanford’s Dr. Scott Atlas: There Is ‘No Science Behind Having Children Not Attend Schools’)
“Even the airlines are pushing back and saying, what is your science?” he said. “The same with restaurants. What if eight people are in the same family and hang out with their neighbors? Can we not let them make that decision? Neighbors get together and have picnics and associate with people. That is happening. When you go to a restaurant, you are not allowed to sit with those people? There are some absurdities do this thing.”
“If you are in a nursing home or have cancer, take extra precautions by all means, but I don’t like the one-size-fits-all,” he concluded. “I’m against the mandatory masks. I’m against most of the government mandates on your personal behavior. I think we should be largely left free.”