On Sunday, Kentucky GOP Senator Rand Paul, following Dr. Anthony Fauci’s statement on ABC’s “This Week” about prioritizing keeping schools open, stated that Fauci owes “every single parent and school-age child in America” an apology for prior statements.
“The default position should be to try as best as possible, within reason, to keep the children in school, to get them back to school,” Fauci told ABC on Sunday, as reported by The Hill. “If you look at the data, the spread among children and from children is not very big at all, not like one would have suspected. So let’s try to get the kids back. But let’s try to mitigate the things that maintain and push the kind of community spread we are trying to avoid. And those are the things you know well. The bars, the restaurants … those are the things that drive the community spread. Not the schools.”
After Fauci made his statement, Jack Posobiec tweeted, “Dr Fauci owes @RandPaul an apology.”
Paul replied, “No, he owes one to every single parent and school-age child in America. I told him this multiple times this summer.”
I told him this multiple times this summer. https://t.co/LspBtxtU6D
— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) November 29, 2020
In late June, Paul confronted Fauci at a hearing in the Senate. The senator cited statistics that he claimed showed “22 countries have reopened their schools and have seen no discernible increases in cases.”
“These graphs behind me show no surge when schools open,” said Paul. “The red line is where the schools opened. There is data from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, no spike when schools are opened. Contact tracing studies in China, Iceland, Britain, and the Netherlands failed to find a single case of child to adult infection.”
“Brown University researchers collected data on daycares that remained open during the pandemic, over 25,000 kids in their study. [They] found that only 0.16% got COVID,” he added. He continued, “Just yesterday, the American Academy of Pediatrics says, ‘We’ve got to get kids back in school. We want them physically present in school.’ They even cite mounting evidence that children are less likely to contract the virus. Ultimately, this all comes down to the fatal conceit that central planners have enough knowledge somehow to tell a nation of 330 million people what they can and can’t do.”
Then he targeted Fauci: “Dr. Fauci, every day, virtually every day we seem to hear from you things we can’t do. But when you’re asked, can we go back to school, I don’t hear much certitude at all. I hear, well maybe it depends. … All I hear, Dr. Fauci, is we can’t do this, we can’t do that. We can’t play baseball. … [M]y question to you is can’t you give us a little bit more on schools that we can get back to school, that there’s a great deal of evidence, and that it’s actually good evidence that kids aren’t transmitting this. It’s rare. And that kids are staying healthy and that yes, we can open our schools.”
Fauci responded, “I feel very strongly we need to do whatever we can to get the children back to school. So I think we are in lock agreement with that.”
In June, Fauci stated on CNBC’s “Halftime Report” that the question of reopening schools in the fall had a “complicated answer,” stating, “It has to be a bit of a — and I don’t mean lengthwise — a bit of a complicated answer, because the United States is a large country … When you’re talking about getting back to a degree of normality and school openings and things like that, it’s always related to the level of activity of the virus.”