Permanent Washington cannot have the pandemic end: Sen. Rand Paul
Sen. Rand Paul calls out Fauci, media, Democrats for walking-back President Biden's comments on 'Jesse Watters Primetime.'
After President Biden's proclamation that the coronavirus "pandemic is over" led to Democrats and his own White House appearing to contradict or nuance his statement, Sen. Rand Paul said it shows he is not in charge of much of anything anymore.
In the wake of Biden's interview with CBS News, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, along with Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, among others, offered varied translations of what Biden told reporter Scott Pelley.
"The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over," Biden said.
On "Jesse Watters Primetime," Paul, who is a medical doctor, said the entire episode reveals the truth about the administration.
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U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a rally hosted by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) at Richard Montgomery High School (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
"This may come as a surprise to you, but I am not sure that Joe Biden is fully in charge of the government — or fully in charge of his wits, for that matter," Paul said Tuesday.
"The thing is, the response to this [from those in power] has always been about submission and control of the individual. These are the people who truly believe in the nanny state."
Paul pointed to how several Democratic state governorships, like New York, Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey, Rhode Island and others, sought to impose socioeconomic restrictions by executive fiat on their constituents.
"Whether it's your business they want to be in charge of, or your health care — they can't give it up," he said, adding that in states like Florida, there effectively "hasn't been [a pandemic] on the ground for a long time."
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Lower Saxony, Hildesheim: A member of staff crazes a figure of a plague doctor wearing a beak mask at the Roemer- und Pelizaeus-Museum Hildesheim (RPM) in the special exhibition "Seuchen. Curse of the past - threat of the future". (Julian Stratenschulte/picture alliance via Getty Images)
"The pandemic was over two years ago in Florida. It's still going on in the minds of Democrats, but it hasn't been on the ground on for a long time."
One relevant response to Biden's proclamation came from NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who clashed with Paul on occasion in Senate hearings.
"We are not where we need to be if we're going to be able to, quote, ‘Live with the virus,' because we know we're not going to eradicate it," he said in a recent interview.
In response, Paul said Fauci and other establishment experts are comparable to those during the 17th century European plague that instituted the wearing of bird-beak-like "plague masks" — wherein the long arched nasal brim was stuffed with camphor or lavender as a purported prophylactic against viral transmission.
"Dr. Fauci's science is not far removed from that," Paul said, noting a moment in a recent hearing where the Kentuckian presented the immunologist with his own words from a 2004 C-SPAN appearance wherein Fauci praised natural immunity as an effective deterrent.
"He used to believe that, and now he only wants us to submit. He wants to be in charge if he can get one more hit on television," he said, in terms of how the Brooklyn-born doctor represents the establishment view in that way.
"The [N95] masks did not change the trajectory of the disease at all. The stickers on the floor only made the people who made the stickers richer."
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