On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America Reports,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said that any public health policy President Joe Biden comes out with on Thursday won’t have any scientific backing since we don’t know how severe the Omicron variant is and argued that it’s wrong to make “blanket” decisions before we know whether the Omicron variant is a more lethal variant or a less lethal variant.
Paul said, “There was a saying among people in medical school that when you’re learning about what to do in an emergency situation, that before you take the pulse of the person you see laying still, take your own pulse. The meaning of the saying was not to freak out, to try to stay calm, and try to make rational decisions before you freak out and do something you shouldn’t do. First, do no harm. The same should happen here. We have something that is a new variant, it has many different mutations. It could be really, really bad or it could be really, really mild. We really don’t know the truth of that yet. … There’s a lot of things you don’t know, but Fauci’s immediate response is to tell people they must do something. What we really ought to do is study this and see what happens over the next week or two and see what becomes of this. I don’t think a travel ban will work.”
He added, “It would be foolish to have any kind of public health policy come out tomorrow. Anything Biden says will be unsupported by any science. It will be basically his sort of gut protective, oh my goodness, government must do something. And in all likelihood, government will do the wrong thing. So, we should wait, we should pause, we should study this.”
Paul further stated, “If you heard tomorrow that a new coronavirus came out of South Africa, but the symptoms were the same as a cold and that no one was dying from it, why would you want to test everybody? You would waste millions of dollars, interrupt millions of people’s travel, quarantine all these people. Now, if it’s the black plague, maybe we do have to do more testing. So, I’m not saying absolutely we don’t. I’m just saying we’ve no idea. Why would you make a blanket decision for the whole world on locking the economy down, locking the country up, banning travel before you know whether this is a deadly variant or a less deadly variant?”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.