CLAY: We’re joined now by Senator and Doctor Rand Paul from the great state of Kentucky where, by the way, they managed to get a 10th win in the bowl game under Coach Mark Stoops. Nice win over Iowa. Sorry, Hawkeye fans. We bring in Senator Paul. And, Senator, congratulations on your announcement that you’re going to be running for another term. I know many people in the state of Kentucky were excited about that. Was it a tough decision for you? How much time did you spend making this choice?

SEN. PAUL: You know, the hard part for me has always been deciding for my first love — well, actually my first love is my wife. But my second love would be medicine. And between continuing to do eye surgery… I’m able to do a little bit on the side, pro bono or free eye surgery. But I can’t really own or have a practice. And so the decision to stay out of that for another six years is a big decision that weighs on me. But I figure that I’m gonna continue to try to do charitable surgery when I can and combine the two.

I also look at it this way. If I’m not up here, I think people will give Fauci a pass, you know? If I’m not up here to point out that he covered up where the origin of the virus was, I don’t know who will. If I’m not up here to talk about gain-of-function research, the idea that they were juicing these viruses up to make super viruses. If we win in 2022, I could well be a chairman of a committee that’s able to subpoena Fauci and his records, bring him forward, and I’ll do that.

And I think that sometimes even we have Republicans we think we like sometimes they don’t have the guts to bring people forward and force them to produce records. But I feel strongly that if this virus came from in a lab, by golly, we must never let this happen again. I don’t think anybody’s done a damn thing to prevent this from happening again.

BUCK: Senator and Dr. Paul, thanks for being with us, as always. You see these case numbers, all-time records, I mean, which homicide even for those of us who thought we were gonna be in for a somewhat rough winter the fact of the matter is when you’re sitting all-time records — even including where we were before there were any vaccines, before we knew very much at all about this virus — it’s pretty stunning for folks, particularly those of us who are in places that are hard hit like the Northeastern Corridor. It feels like there is no honesty nor any humility from the public health apparatus at the federal level in particular in this country about what has to be viewed as a failure. Is it not a failure of many of the policies like vaccine mandates, for example, that we’ve seen?

SEN. PAUL: I think we should gain and learn humility. The fact that even in the era of modern medicine, we can’t completely control the outcome of viral pandemics. And right now we have very little control over Omicron. We are much Better at treating it. We’re saving a lot more lives and the death rate and the mortality has gone way down with this. There are many that are predicting that this is now the transformation of a deadly flu into a more common cold.

We have four coronaviruses that make up 20% of the common colds. There are many people, many, many scientists now that this will become the fifth one, and it may be Omicron is a blessing in disguise that. Having 500,000 people get it, you’re simply conferring immunity to the vast majority of them, and it does help. With helps with immunity to the more serious cases too.

So if you get Omicron, a much less serious disease, it will give you immunity to Delta and also to the original wild type as well. So this is a way of sorting getting nature’s booster or nature’s vaccine. Now, we’re gonna know more in about two or three weeks ’cause we’ll be past the rising cases, and we’ll see what the death rate does. But in other countries, it looks like the death rate has not risen like previous waves and that we’re getting a lot of immunity without the death rate, which would be good for all of us.

CLAY: Senator, what should we do to China over their failure to share basic honest data with us over their lies, over their continued cover-ups. I’m fired up on the fact that we’re even going to the Winter Olympics and that we’re sending our athletes to Beijing almost feels like bending the knee to China in many ways. I understand it from an Olympics perspective.

It’s frustrating ’cause I don’t feel like we have great options. What should we do, what would a Republican-controlled Senate, in your mind, and a Republican-controlled House be able to do going forward? You mentioned hearings. But what should the consequences to China being from their behavior associated with covid?

SEN. PAUL: Number one: Don’t send ’em another penny for any reason. Don’t send ’em any kind of scientific equipment, technology. Do not fund their research where they’re still doing this same kind of research, and they’re also militarizing some of this. None of this should be shared with them, and none of it should be sent to them. In every international forum we’re in, we shouldn’t allow any international forums to send ’em money as well.

If they’re in an international forum, we should gang up with all of the other countries and say, “You want to be in the WHO, you want to be in the World Trade Organization, you want to be in the United Nations? You’re going to have to give an explaining. There will be a reckoning over what happened here, and you will have to produce this information,” because all of the scientific information now shows that in all likelihood this came from the lab.

They tested 80,000 animals. They couldn’t find any animals with covid. They tested the blood of 9,000 Chinese from Wuhan from 2019, and none of them had covid. And you would expect if this were coming on and it came from animals, it would have had to have developed gradually over several months. When this thing showed up it showed up with this enormous blip in sort of December, January indicating that this thing probably came straight from lab.

So, yes, they should be punished. The first thing, the one thing we can control is no more money. I introduced an amendment two months ago now that passed overwhelmingly in the Senate to say no more funding to the Wuhan lab, but Nancy Pelosi’s blocked the legislation in the House and it sits idly there. I think they’ll try to strip it also in conference committee if they ever pass the bill that it was on.

But we shouldn’t give them any money. We should ostracize them. We should condemn what they did. But the bottom line is we should be having international if not national conversations about should any government be funding gain-of-function research. There are many, many prominent scientists who are not partisans, some of them have privately said, “Well, we really don’t like Republicans, and we really don’t like you, but on this gain-of-function we’re absolutely with you.

“There need to be more government regulations as far as can government money go to funding where we create viruses that don’t exist in nature that could end up killing half of the world.” This will have a 1% mortality in the end. That’s a lot of people. What if this virus had had 15% or 50%? And the Democrats have not allowed one investigative hearing on this. If and when I’m chairman of a committee in 2022, we’ll subpoena all of Fauci’s records.

We’ll subpoena him under oath, and we will subpoena all of his assistants and associates under oath, we will get to the bottom of this. I absolutely think that there was a cover-up, that he was scared to death when this thing came out and that he and his assistants and all of his colleagues, they gathered and circled their wagons to try to prevent any information to come out.

We now know that he and Dr. Collins immediately attacked other epidemiologists who disagreed with them in an organized way, plotting with other government officials to condemn the Great Barrington Declaration, which simply said that we should try our best to get and save those who are most vulnerable — the elderly — from this.

BUCK: Speaking to Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Senator, where do we go from here? I think for a lot of people who are in states that have taken a more fact- and reason-based posture for a long time now, maybe it feels like the status quo is pretty sustainable. In some of the bluer states it feels like we’re enter the mania all over again. What happens now? When do you think the tide finally turns such that people no longer will give up their basic liberties and allow for this autocratic nonsense to continue with all these measures, all these “mitigations,” as Fauci calls them?

SEN. PAUL: I think the tide has turned. I saw a clip on CNN the other day, and I don’t recommend watching unless you have anti-emetics or something, but I watched it for a couple of minutes, and I saw a woman on there who’s been terrible on everything. She’s an infectious disease doctor and she’s been terrible on everything, and she admitted on CNN, of all places, that wearing a cloth mask is just wearing facial decoration.

So when on CNN they begin to admit that we were sold a bill of goods on these cloth masks, then I think it’s beginning to turn, that maybe even the left wing will tire particularly of wearing a mask that doesn’t have any anti-infectious value. The cloth masks have absolutely no value other than theater, and even CNN’s now admitting that. So I think it is starting to turn. You’re getting many, many doctors from many, many different viewpoints who now are not afraid of Fauci, they’re coming out and they’re saying, “Guess what?

“This lessening of lethality of Omicron and increased transmissibility may end up being nature’s form of a vaccine. It may be now that everybody gets Omicron and it becomes another one of the cold viruses,” and that’s what our hope is. And we should be optimistic that then we can quit doing the lockdowns. But the only way to get rid of the lockdowns is you have to quit testing people who don’t have any symptoms. This is the first time in the history of modern medicine we’ve tested people without symptoms.

We need to quit testing prophylactically the whole world, because what we’re finding is it ramifies out and we’re getting people who aren’t sick. We’re shutting them down, quarantining them and you can’t even get a plane anymore ’cause half the crew’s gone. They’re not sick, they have no symptoms, but they’ve been in some kind of mandatory testing program, and it’s going to eventually shut down the whole economy.

CLAY: Senator Paul, are you worried at all about the idea of boosters being required for people? We’re talking about in Israel. I’m sure you’ve seen, they’re starting on a fourth shot now, a second booster. What would you advise people as it comes to boosters, and are you concerned at all — we were talking about this earlier on the show — about a waning efficacy if you continue to give people shots for covid and what that might mean into the future?

SEN. PAUL: If you’re over 65 or have some health problems or you’re overweight at almost any age, probably the booster is not an unreasonable thing. I don’t think the proof is entirely there that the first two shots might not be enough for you because really what we’re doing is reducing significant hospitalization and death. Now, some people say, “Oh, well, their antibodies are low.” Well, your antibodies are only part of the immune system.

You also have B memory cells and T memory sells, and there’s a host of cells who come together through the immune system to attack viruses. What we do know is that people who have been vaccinated can catch it again, and even people like myself who have been infected can catch it again. But you have pre-existing immunity now. So the facts are — and this is something that CDC should reveal — the secondary infections are very, very mild.

What I’d like to know is, if there are tens of thousands of people like me who haven’t been vaccinated but had the disease, are any of them going to the hospital? Are any of them dying? What percentage of them are? Isn’t it extraordinary the CDC does not release any information on natural immunity? They’re really not releasing even the information on reinfections of those who are vaccinated.

Are they hospitalized? Are they dying? Is it a very small percentage? Is it one in a million or it is one in a hundred? I mean, wouldn’t we want to know all of these things before we decide to boost the whole world? But the boosting of teenagers, particularly teenage males, I think it’s malpractice. If you are thinking about your teenage male son, I would get them tested for antibodies to see if they already are the disease. If you want to vaccinate them, I would consider one vaccine.

Most of the myocarditis has come from Moderna and 90% of the myocarditis has come with the second shot. So I think a booster would probably be malpractice for a 15-year-old boy, but schools are requiring it. The idiocy of some of our top-ranked schools… Harvard’s supposed to be this great school, we have to have perfect scores to get in, and they’re requiring a booster for young males who in all likelihood have a greater risk now of myocarditis from a third booster than they do from getting the disease?

So this is really bad, bad science, and I blame really Fauci for most of it because he’s the top of the food chain. He directs it. He ignores science. He’s full of a lot of opinions and dictates but he’s ignored the science to the point of being malpractice and the advice that a young teenage male get a booster. That is absolute malpractice.

BUCK: Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, sir, thanks for being with us. Appreciate it.

SEN. PAUL: Thank you.