Dr. Anthony Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul had their latest heated exchange on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, with Paul calling his fellow doctor and nemesis a “central planner” out to silence dissent and Fauci accusing Paul of raising funds by attacking him.
Paul, a Kentucky Republican, charged Fauci with conspiring with fellow federal health officials such as former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins to quash opinions from scientists that differ from the administration’s strategy for fighting the pandemic. The two often spoke over one another. Fauci accused Paul of attacking him to gain political points with swaths of people who have lost faith in the federal government’s handling of the pandemic.
“Dr. Fauci, the idea that a government official like yourself would claim [that you] unilaterally represent science and that any criticism of you is criticism of science itself is quite dangerous,” Paul began. “Central planning, whether it be of the economy or of science, is risky because of the fallibility of the planner.”
A testy Fauci blasted back, accusing Paul of politicizing the deadly virus.
“You accuse me of, in a monolithic way, telling people what they need to do. Everything that I’ve said has been in support of the CDC guidelines: Wear a mask, get boosted,” Fauci said. “So I would like to make something clear to the committee. He’s doing this for political reasons.”
Fauci also cited threats made against his life and the lives of his family members, which Paul countered with examples of his own life being threatened over pandemic politics. Paul was also present at the 2017 baseball field shooting in Virginia when 24 Republicans practicing for a charity game were targeted by an attacker with a gun. This resulted in a shootout between the gunman and the Capitol Police. Senate Minority Whip Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, was shot and had to undergo surgery.
“It’s disappointing for you to suggest that people who dare to question you are responsible somehow for violent threats. Realize that by attacking me, you’re attacking the one member who actually has suffered from violent attacks,” Paul said. “We had over 160 rounds of semi-automatic weapons fired at us. … So for you to somehow suggest that somehow I or people who dare to oppose you are responsible for a threat, that’s insulting.”
Paul and Fauci have engaged in such back-and-forth in past hearings to examine the administration’s response to COVID-19, which has a death toll approaching 840,000, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker.
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Paul also accused Fauci of refusing to acknowledge dissenting views about mitigation measures, including lockdowns.
Paul cited support from the scientific community for the Great Barrington Declaration, an online petition written by three epidemiologists from Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of Oxford. The scientists who supported the declaration, now numbering above 910,000, decried early lockdown policies as being too broad to do any good for the concentrated communities most vulnerable to the virus, such as the elderly. Fauci and Collins were found to have called for a “devastating published takedown of its premises” after a Freedom of Information Act request exposed emails between them.
Paul added: “A planner who believes he is the science leads to an arrogance that justifies in his mind using government resources to smear and to destroy the reputations of other scientists who disagree with them.”
Fauci, who held up a photo of a webpage from Paul’s site soliciting donations and calling for Fauci to be fired, said at the hearing that Paul was engaging in personal attacks against him and risking his safety.
“We are here at a committee to look at a virus now that has killed almost 900,000 people, and the purpose of the committee was to try and get things out, how we can help to … the American public, and you keep coming back to personal attacks on me that have absolutely no relevance to reality,” Fauci said.
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Fauci and Paul most recently clashed in a November hearing, when Paul pressed Fauci on a theory that the virus was created in and escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was performing a risky type of research on pathogens called “gain of function.” Some gain-of-function research, conducted on existing pathogens, has raised concerns over the potential to enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of the virus. Fauci has maintained that the virus most likely arose in nature after mutating and replicating in animals before infecting humans.
“It makes me very uncomfortable to have to say something, but he is egregiously incorrect in what he says,” Fauci said of Paul.
