Sen. Paul talks Dr. Fauci and masks, stimulus, and border problems

Lexi: Senator, you and Dr. Fauci had a very heated exchange recently over masks. Why do you think masks are “theatre”?

Senator: We wear a mask to supposedly protect our health. But if you’ve already been vaccinated or if you’ve had the disease and you have immunity, there isn’t really any scientific evidence that you can spread the disease. This is why I said the burden is on Dr. Fauci to prove if he wants you to wear a mask. Yesterday the Lexington Herald had a writer who said we’re going to keep some of the mask mandates forever. For young people like yourself I mean do people really wanna live with a mask for the rest of their life? If science says it’s gonna save your life then maybe. But see the thing is there isn’t any scientific study that says after you’ve been vaccinated or after you got the disease naturally, that we’re spreading it. If it were so we would see news articles that say oh 500 people who got in last spring now have it again and 100 of them died. That would be horrific and if that were true I’d wear a mask again. So I’m willing to wear a mask and advise it if they show me proof that people who have already had it are getting it in large numbers, going to the hospital and dying. But what’s happening is on the rare occasion that someone got it again, they’re saying he got it again, it’s really scary, but he didn’t get sick or she didn’t get sick and they had no symptoms. So we gotta put this in perspective, we can’t just listen to Dr. Fauci say oh what if the South African variant comes and the vaccine doesn’t work. So far the science says the variants are covered by the vaccination and the variants have also been covered by those who have been naturally infected. Is there an exception to the rule? There’s a handful of people out of 30 million people who already had Covid in our country who got it again. But guess what, most people got a very mild form of it and it’s less than a tenth of one percent. 

Lexi: And following up to that question, do you think you and Dr. Fauci disagree because you guys have different medical backgrounds?

Senator: I think it’s different philosophies. And I think that he’s not a bad person, I think he’s well-intended, but he’s someone who’s worked for the government his whole life. And he sees it from this perspective that’s unrealistic. He wants to have a public policy where no one has the possibility of ever getting sick. I see it more realistically, that in a free society, every individual has the ability to make their own decisions and if I tell you that if you don’t wear a mask you have a one chance in a million of dying or getting sick that you’ll take your own risk. People your age will wear a mask, I see people your age wearing three masks. And then there’s other people that say one in a million, I got a worse chance of a car hitting me head on coming across the median when I drive home today then I do dying from Covid, then they take it into perspective. So in a free society everyone gets to make these decisions. If you are an elitist, or a progressive or a liberal, they think that the common man is too stupid to make these decisions so they want to make these decisions for us. It’s also why they lie to us. They don’t lie intentionally but they give us this noble lie. So he’s wearing a mask not really to protect him or anyone else, he’s wearing a mask to tell people to wear a mask, he’s trying to set an example to wear a mask. But he’s lying to us to say he’s actually protecting someone and that’s why I challenge him to show us the study, show us the government or scientific study, that proves that people who are vaccinated are still spreading this disease. It doesn’t exist. It’s a big maybe, but there’s no evidence that it’s happening so he needs to refrain from telling us what to do with our lives and taking away our freedom until we have some proof. 

Lexi: Another thing that has happened because of the pandemic is stimulus checks. How do you think we’re going to pay back all of that money?

Senator: You’ll be paying for it for most of your life. We borrowed about 6 trillion last year and 6 trillion this year. So this is an enormous amount of money we’ve never ever borrowed this much in fact it’s more borrowing than we did during World War II. What happens is we pay it back, the Federal Reserve buys a lot of the debt. And when the Federal Reserve buys it they create more money. So they create a computer entry and they say here’s a treasury bill here’s a million dollars and they buy a million dollar treasury bill. But that money came out of nowhere so it increases the numbers of dollars circulating and that causes prices to rise. So ultimately it’s a self-defeating cycle and the people that get hurt the worst are those who are at the lower raises and the lower salaries. As the prices rise at the gas pump and the grocery store and for rent what happens is those people get squeezed because their salaries don’t keep up with it. You have to think through this. Most people get if you tell them, do you think people get free money every month? They say well there might be some free limits to that. But who’s gonna turn down free money. I’m not saying send back your check or the government will waste it even more. But at the same time the government doesn’t need to do this every month or we’ll end up destroying the currency of the country. 

Lexi: And switching gears to something happening right now. With the problems at the border, do you think we need to call this a crisis and what do we need to do to fix it?

Senator: I think you can’t have an open border. Look I’m all for immigration, I have many good friends who are immigrants who have come to this country legally and lawfully who have come to Bowling Green and are good people. And I’m really proud that we are a melting pot and that we do invite people to this country. But almost all the people I’ve met in Bowling Green are people who come here lawfully. If we say people can march across the border millions of people will march across at once and they will overwhelm our hospitals and our schools and there was a poll a few years ago that said if anyone could come and was allowed to come, over 700 million people would. Our country has 330 million people. We can’t double the size of our country just by letting everybody walk in. And so the problem that Biden has gotten us into is he sent the signal to all of Central America that he’s going to accept you. And that it’s fine to accept them illegally, they’re all wearing Biden T-shirts for goodness sakes. It’s a problem they’re going to overwhelm things down there, overwhelm the hospitals. It’s the same thing people worried about like with Covid overwhelming hospitals, immigrants can overwhelm hospitals if they come in here unlawfully.