Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Wednesday went head-to-head with former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Susan Monarez over decisions involving vaccines, questioning the efficacy — or lack thereof — of the coronavirus shot as well as the science behind giving infants the hepatitis B shot.
Paul said during Wednesday’s hearing it is crucial to restore trust in public health, but doing so requires an honest conversation about the “actual science” behind some of these recommendations on vaccines, particularly regarding the childhood vaccine schedule.
“This is about specific vaccines. It’s about specific age groups. It’s about specific policies,” Paul said, making it clear that he is not having a blanket discussion on whether all vaccines are good or bad.
“Does the COVID vaccine prevent transmission?” he asked the former CDC director, who stated that it can help reduce viral load, effectively sidestepping the question and asserting that a reduced viral load can help reduce transmission. But Paul noted that the vaccine itself does not prevent transmission of the virus — a reality that stands as a well-known fact in 2025 despite misinformation spread by public health officials during the Biden era.
“It doesn’t prevent transmission. You can still transmit the virus if you’ve had the vaccine. In fact, there’s been reduced ability to interfere with transmission over time, and what we’ve found is the most recent one since Omicron is down around 16 percent reduction if there is a reduction,” Paul said before asking if the COVID vaccine reduces hospitalization for children under 18.
While the former CDC director said “it can,” Paul pointed out that the science does not back that up.
“It doesn’t,” the senator said. “The statistics are inconclusive, and the reason you can’t prove that it does is there’s so few people under 18 that go to the hospital. The numbers are extraordinarily small. There’s like 76 million kids under 18 in our country — 183 died, and a few thousand went to the hospital in 2020 and 2021, and since then, the numbers have dropped precipitously.
“The COVID vaccine is not reducing hospitalization. It’s not statistically significant,” Paul continued before asking if the vaccine reduces the rate of death for children under 18. Once again, Monarez said “it can,” which Paul dismissed as a “ridiculous answer.”
“No, it doesn’t, and there is no statistical evidence that it does reduce the death rate. These are statistics. We’ve looked at it when they approved it. They had this discussion at the vaccine committee that we’ve been talking about during the discussion,” Paul began, making the point that the recommendation for babies and children to get the coronavirus vaccine is not based on science at all:
They acknowledged that there was no proof of production and hospitalization or in death. So what they did is they said, what can we use to try to make people take this vaccine? They came up with this. They said that if we give you a COVID vaccine, you make antibodies. So really, the whole recommendation for having a COVID vaccine from six months up is not based on hospitalization data, not based on tests. It’s based on whether you make antibodies or not. And what people fail to see from this is I can inject you with a foreign protein every week and measure antibodies, you’ll make antibodies every time. It just means immunology work [and] has nothing to do with whether you should get a vaccine every week.
Ultimately, Paul said there is no existing science showing benefits to give a coronavirus vaccine to a six month old. Because of that, everyone must then ask what the risks are.
“We have large population studies of the risks of the vaccine in younger people, and it turns out that you don’t see this as much if you look at the general population, but once you start isolating it by age group, which you have to do in COVID, because there’s such a disparity among age group, you find that there is a risk of myocarditis — a significant event,” he said.
“So you resisted firing people who have this idea that the COVID vaccine should be at six months. That’s what this is about. You didn’t resist firing the beautiful, the perfect, beautiful scientists that are career people and unobjective and unbiased. You wouldn’t fire the people who are saying that we have to vaccinate our kids at six months of age — that’s who you refused to fire,” he pointed out.
Paul ultimately said this debate is about changing the overall childhood schedule, using the hepatitis B vaccine on the schedule — given to newborns — as another example.
“What is the medical scientific reason and proof for giving a newborn a hepatitis B vaccine if the mom is hep B negative?” he asked, as Monarez did not answer the question.
“What is the medical reason for giving a hepatitis B vaccine to a newborn? See, everybody’s like blithely going along… You want to make all the kids take this. The burden is upon you and the people you wouldn’t fire to prove to us that we need to give our six month old a COVID vaccine and that we need to give our one day old hepatitis B vaccine,” Paul stressed, pointing to the larger debate.
“That’s what the debate ought to be about, not whether all vaccines are good…” he added, as Monarez tried to say that she agreed and was “open” to the science — a remark Paul dismissed as untrue.
This comes as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine advisory committee meets to vote on changing recommendations for the coronavirus, hepatitis B, and chickenpox jabs.
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