Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) reportedly criticized former president Donald Trump this week for asserting in an interview that he was unable to remove Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Paul added that even if this were the case, there was no reason why Trump had to appoint Fauci to oversee the U.S. government’s response to the pandemic.
“He should not be so proud of keeping Fauci around. Fauci was a menace to the truth. Talk about a fount of misinformation, it’s Anthony Fauci. More misinformation came out of the government than any other source. So he should have fired him.” Paul said to Fox News host Jesse Watters.
“There may be civil service rules about actually firing him, but there’s no reason he had to head up the pandemic committee, the COVID Committee. So he was on the committee. In fact, if not the lead, he was the committee with the vice president. They met all of the time.” Paul continues.
Trump was not legally permitted to terminate Fauci personally under federal civil service rules, but he could have directed political appointees to do so if they had good reason.
Trump may have reduced Fauci’s influence over news conferences and the formulation and application of COVID policy, though.
“The one thing that could have saved thousands of lives before the vaccine, was that the nurses and the assistants and the people taking care of people in the nursing home, we should have put people in those positions who had already been infected and recovered, knowing that naturally acquired immunity would then protect those senior citizens from getting infected. And we never did that because Fauci kept saying, ‘well, we’re not sure, we’re not sure.’” Paul added.
“Well, immunity, we are pretty certain of. That’s what vaccines are based on his naturally acquired immunity from the disease. We try to simulate that with a vaccine. So — but by denying it, I think many lives were cost, and there would have been a better way, I think, under the Trump administration to marginalize and push Fauci out of the spotlight and keep his nonsense and his misinformation from infecting the rest of us.” he concluded.
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