Sen. Rand Paul leveled an attack against Dr. Anthony Fauci’s credibility after the nation’s leading infectious disease doctor commended the state of New York for its recent handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Paging Dr. Fauci! According to JHU, NY’s per capita death rate is more than 2X greater than Italy Spain & Britain & more than 8X worse than Florida & 10X worse than Texas,” Paul tweeted Monday. “For you to say NY got it done correctly disregards the facts & calls your judgement into question.”
Paging Dr. Fauci! According to JHU, NY’s per capita death rate is more than 2X greater than Italy Spain & Britain & more than 8X worse than Florida & 10X worse than Texas. For you to say NY got it done correctly disregards the facts & calls your judgement into question.
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) July 20, 2020
Fauci cited New York last week as a model other states should follow when reopening their local economies during the pandemic.
“Remember, we can do it. We know that when you do it properly, you bring down those cases. We’ve done it. We’ve done it in New York,” Fauci told PBS. “New York got hit worse than any place in the world. And they did it correctly by doing the things that you’re talking about.”
Once the national epicenter of the pandemic, New York officials have recently reported a drop in cases and deaths. Several states, including Florida, Texas, and Arizona, have seen major spikes in cases and hospitalizations.
President Trump and some Republican governors have attributed those increases to a more robust national testing capacity, but Fauci said some states are opening too quickly or without proper safety procedures in place.
“When you start seeing more hospitalizations, that’s a surefire sign that you’re in a situation where you’re going in the wrong direction,” Fauci said last month, conceding that “you are going to see blips of infections” as states reopen.
Paul, a Republican, has been sharply critical of Fauci for a number of prognostications he made during the pandemic’s early days, some of which turned out to be incorrect.
“I think we ought to have a little bit of humility in our belief that we know what’s best for the economy,” Paul said during a May Senate coronavirus response oversight hearing. “And, as much as I respect you, Dr. Fauci, I don’t think you’re the end-all. I don’t think you’re the one person that gets to make a decision.”
Paul, who represents Kentucky, said in more rural states, “we never really reached any sort of pandemic levels in Kentucky and other states. We have less deaths in Kentucky than we have in an average flu season.”
Public health officials in Kentucky warned this week of a “skyrocketing” case count and an 18% increase in rural Graves County over the last seven days.
“Things are open, [people] have been locked down for three months, and they want to live their lives thinking they can’t get it,” said Alicia Thompson, an infection control nurse at the county health department said.
Trump has broken with Fauci and other public health experts, downplaying the threat of the virus and insisting businesses and schools reopen as soon as possible.
“Well, I think we are in a good place,” Trump said during a recent television interview. “I disagree with him. Dr. Fauci said don’t wear masks, and now he says wear them. I didn’t listen to my experts, and I banned China. We would have been in much worse shape. So we’ve done a good job.”
More than 3.8 million cases of the coronavirus have been reported in the United States since January, and nearly 141,000 Americans have died of the resulting disease.
[Opinion: Maybe Fauci really is losing it]
