Freedom

By Charlie McCarthy

Government officials and medical experts should be promoting COVID-19 therapeutics and focus less on vaccines and mandates, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told Newsmax on Thursday morning.

Paul, a physician, said the U.S. has reached a level of resistance to COVID-19 that will allow the country to cope with the disease. Now, messaging should be toward the few at-risk people who remain unvaccinated.

“The main thing we need to do, and that Dr. [Anthony] Fauci’s still not doing, is promote the idea that there are therapeutics and people need to come in [to the hospital] early,” Paul told host Rob Finnerty on “Wake Up America.”

“If you wait, and you wait, and you get so sick that you can barely breathe when you go to the hospital, those treatments don’t work.”

Paul said vaccines remain useful despite not stopping transmission of the disease.

“I still think the vaccine reduces your risk for hospitalization, as does previous infection. But I don’t think that mandating the vaccine or the government getting involved is the right way,” he told Newsmax.

“It also ignores the fact that really the vast majority of people at risk for this disease have voluntarily gotten vaccinated. This is something they won’t tell you if you watch CNN and everybody’s ringing their hands saying, No one’s been vaccinated! It’s not true — 97% of people over 65 have voluntarily been vaccinated.”

Paul warned that people overweight and those 55-and-up who are at home getting sicker, need to get to the hospital where monoclonal antibodies work best in first five-to-10 days.

“I have not heard Fauci one time go on television and say, Implore people to get early treatment,” Paul said.

He added that if the government wants people to get vaccinated, officials need to be truthful.

“Tell them previous infection works, and you probably don’t need to get vaccinated if you had an infection. You’re not at risk,” Paul told Finnerty.

“But then also, the people who are not vaccinated, it looks like if you’re vaccinated, you are 20 times less likely to go to the hospital, but also 55 times less likely to go the hospital if you’ve been infected.”

Paul cited the recent Johns Hopkins University analysis that indicated COVID-19 lockdowns in the spring of 2020 reduced COVID-19 mortality by only 0.2% in the U.S. and Europe.

“Not one thing the government did — mandating how many people can be in your restaurant, saying you can’t serve drinks after 10 [p.m.], none of that affected the trajectory,” he told Newsmax. “It was based on false sides, based on conjecture.”

Paul also discussed dining Tuesday night at a Washington, D.C., restaurant that was shut down for refusing to enforce COVID-19 mask and vaccine mandates.

“Common sense would go a long way,” Paul told Finnerty. “Mandating the vaccine and saying that a restaurant owner essentially has to become the vaccine police isn’t very American.

“The owner of this restaurant, Big Board, served in the Navy for 10 years. He’s a nice guy, he doesn’t really have an ax to grind. He says he’s not that political — I believe him. He just wants to serve the people who come there.”

Paul also was asked about the Olympics in China, from where coronavirus came.

“I think that human rights violations need to be pointed out by everybody,” Rand said, “and people who are making money off them really have a conflict of interest.”

“So, they really should announce it up front. Yes, we’re making a lot of money off the Olympics, but we’re still going to have some people on to make some comments on human rights. My guess is, they won’t have anybody during any of the footage that will say anything about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, what’s happening to Christians, what’s happening to people who are minorities in China, or people who are dissenters.”