Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) will not back down on his opposition to yet another lockdown — a move he denounced as “arbitrary.”
Speaking with FOX Business on Thursday, Sen. Paul said the second wave of COVID-19 lockdowns are distracting from the gains that have been made with the vaccines. He ultimately hoped that the courts would intervene.
“Let’s hope, in this case, the court will intervene,” Paul said. “I’ve been calling my governor for months ‘DWP,’ drunk with power, because he’s taken this power without any consent from the legislature.”
“…the edicts that are coming from the governor, and from the governor of Michigan, they’re completely arbitrary,” he said. “They’re not based in any kind of science. There is really very little objective science to prove that any of this works.”
As to the cloth mask mandates, Paul, a physician, said that studies show that they do not work and exist merely as an act of “theater.”
“They’re theater,” he said. “If you look at the cloth masks, 97% of virus-sized particles go through a cloth mask, so we’re kidding ourselves, and what it’s doing is it’s detracting from the one thing that could save and could really help us, and that’s the vaccine.”
Going forward, Paul said that there should be more people participating in the vaccine trials.
“What they should do is, if they want to continue the trials, instead of 40,000 people in a trial, why don’t we make them 4 million, so at least another 3.5 million could be enrolled in the trials,” he said, later adding: “I see no reason why you can’t start letting people voluntarily, people who want to take it, and I think there will be millions who want to take it — let them get started, and that way we can head towards immunity, combining natural immunity and vaccinated immunity, to get to where we need to get much quicker, but I think waiting another four months to get started is foolish.”
Rand Paul’s comments to FOX Business came several days after he told WABC’s “The CATS Roundtable with John Catsimatidis” that he will oppose a Joe Biden lockdown.
“I’m gonna do everything I can to try to prevent Biden from locking us up and locking us down and forcing us to wear masks forever. We can’t go on like this forever,” Paul said.
“Today, Biden’s talking more about a lockdown,” Paul continued. “This is absolutely why he’s gonna be a terrible president if we get him. He’s gonna ruin the country. Lockdowns don’t work. And in fact, all of the evidence on mandatory masks show that they don’t work either.”
Paul added that the countries in which a mask mandate or a lockdown was instituted, COVID infections went up.
“There’s about 10 different countries or venues, maybe 20, that instituted mandatory masks, and every one of them, to a T, the infection rate or the COVID rate went up after the mask mandate,” Paul said. “Now, this is just showing that … all these mitigation strategies — washing our hands, staying six feet apart — they really don’t work, frankly. And the virus, as the Wall Street Journal put it, is insidious. It does what it’s going to do. The only thing that’s gonna stop it is either enough immunity among individuals in the community or a vaccine.”
Related: Rand Paul Promises To Resist Biden Lockdown: ‘We Can’t Go On Like This Forever’