In hopes of preventing a repeat of lockdowns and other worse-than-useless interventions against infectious diseases, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced an amendment Monday that would immediately fire Dr. Anthony Fauci and divide his current responsibilities among three newly created positions.
“We’ve learned a lot over the past two years, but one lesson in particular is that no one person should be deemed ‘dictator-in-chief.’ No one person should have unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans,” Paul said in a press release. “To ensure that ineffective, unscientific lockdowns and mandates are never foisted on the American people ever again, I’ve introduced this amendment to eliminate Dr. Anthony Fauci’s position as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and divide his power into three separate new institutes.”
Those new institutes would be the National Institute of Allergic Diseases, the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the National Institute of Immunologic Diseases. Their directors would be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for five-year terms.
Paul claims precedent for his legislation in a 2012 law “that eliminated the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) and reassigned some of its programs to” new and existing federal agencies.
Paul and Fauci have sparred repeatedly over the last two years on such subjects as the efficacy of cloth masks and whether or not Fauci had illegally funded gain-of-function research on bat viruses in Wuhan, China. Fauci accused Paul and other critics of being “anti-science,” saying, “I’m going to be saving lives, and they’re going to be lying.”
“I’ve been a physician for over 33 years,” Paul, an ophthalmologist, wrote in a Fox News op-ed. “In all my years studying and practicing medicine, I had never encountered someone with the gall to proclaim himself ‘the science’ and portray anyone opposing him as ‘attacking science.’ That is, until Dr. Fauci became the COVID dictator-in-chief.”
“No one person,” Paul penned, “should have the sole authority to dictate science, especially when that one person wasn’t ever following the science. I’ve said that from the beginning, and I’ve been proven right over, and over, and over again. On masks, lockdowns, schools, natural immunity, all of it.”
On the matter of masks, Paul recounted:
When Dr. Fauci said that cloth masks worked, I was truly concerned because that’s not what the science demonstrated. Misinformation can cost lives if the government convinces 80-year-olds to wear useless cloth masks while taking care of spouses with COVID.
Dr. Fauci caused people to engage in activities they wouldn’t have normally by telling them it was safe when masked when it wasn’t. I tried to sound the alarm, but I was censored by YouTube and my videos were taken down. (“If Dr. Fauci says masks work, it must be true!” the fake-news fact-checkers all screamed in unison.)
Dr. Fauci and his friends worked diligently to silence opposing views. The media amplified his efforts. We were branded conspiracy theorists and anti-science for simply asking questions and presenting alternatives to what had been delivered to the American people as “fact.”
But the problems with Fauci’s approach to COVID-19, which was slavishly followed by so many politicians across the nation, go far beyond that, observed Paul.
“The country is still reeling from the economic fallout of the lockdowns, which didn’t work,” he wrote, pointing to a Johns Hopkins University study that found the lockdowns did next to nothing to reduce COVID-19 deaths while doing “enormous” societal harm, economic and otherwise.
Paul argued that “perhaps the biggest victims of the lockdowns were our children,” who have been kept out of school, forced to mask up and social distance, and so on, “scarring” them in the process. He highlighted irrefutable evidence of this in the form of significantly increased emergency-room visits for kids over suicide, self-harm, and mental health.
Paul’s amendment, if passed into law, would almost certainly solve the problem of Anthony Fauci. Of course, a more lasting and constitutional solution would be to eliminate federal health agencies altogether. Perhaps the senator thought going whole hog would not be politically feasible at this time. However, given Fauci’s godlike status among Democrats, simply legislating him out of a job may not be any easier.
