CLAY: Dr. Fauci resigning, retiring, fleeing off into the night as Republicans are poised to take back at least the House and maybe the Senate. We are joined now by one of the truth-tellers of covid who has tried to hold Dr. Fauci accountable for the lies that he has told. Senator Rand Paul, great state of Kentucky. Senator, when you saw the news break just within the last hour or so — first, thanks for joining us — second, what was your thoughts, what were your immediate reactions to Fauci stepping down?

SEN. PAUL: You know, I thought for some time that he will flee as soon as he thinks that he’ll be given accurate and pointed questions, and I think he won’t want to stand up to the scrutiny. But the thing is, even out of public service he can be subpoenaed, and I say absolutely we should. The origins of the virus are very important, not just for culpability, not just because he funded the lab where this virus in all likelihood originated. But it’s important because we need to get to the bottom of trying to prevent something like this from happening again.

And I don’t think he has been honest. In the immediate aftermath of them finding out the sequence of the RNA for this virus, a host of his buddies were emailing him all day and all night along saying, “Oh, my goodness. This looks like it was manipulated in the lab.” After they all get together and have a meeting… This meeting has been redacted, we can’t see the information that happened in this meeting. When this meeting occurs, then all of a sudden they change their tune and they say, “Oh, if you think it came from a lab,” you’re a conspiracy theorist. So, the thing is, is something went on. I think there was a cover-up and I think we need to get to the bottom of this, and I think he holds the knowledge to this, and I think he needs to be asked these questions under oath.

BUCK: Senator Paul, it’s Buck. We appreciate — and really, speaking for this audience, we all appreciate — your being one of the very few who, for two years now, has been willing to ask Fauci in a forum where he had to really answers questions that he clearly didn’t want to because he was being dishonest with the American people. It’s more than just him, though. The NIH, the CDC, these multibillion-dollar-a-year government federal institutions seem to be abject failures now. I mean, we have the data; we have the results. What does accountability look like? You’re a U.S. senator. What could be done here?

SEN. PAUL: Transparency, for one. Through FOIA, Freedom of Information, outside organizations have found out that 1,800 doctors that are on the payroll of the NIH also received $193 million in royalties from the pharmaceutical companies. And we should be told — without question, we should be told — whether or not any of these people sit on the vaccine committees. Did any of them receive realities from the companies that made the vaccines. When I ask Dr. Fauci this question, he got all up in arms, started rattling on.

And then what he said was, “The law allows us to keep this secret. We are protected by the law, and we do not have to tell you.” So right now, they won’t tell us, and it may be that nobody’s receiving royalties from the vaccine. I hope that’s what’s true. But the thing i.s the fact that they won’t tell us makes it suspicious, and I don’t think this should be protected. I think this should be completely transparent. We should know whether anybody has a self interest who is determining whether or not to approve a vaccine or any drug.

CLAY: Senator Paul, do you think, based on the testimony that you’ve seen from Dr. Fauci — and the evidence, as you mentioned, some of it is not fully public — that Fauci should be investigated and face, potentially, criminal charges for his actions related to covid?

SEN. PAUL: I think that he did lie to Congress when he said that there wasn’t any gain-of-function research going on in Wuhan. We’ve already had testimony from scientists contradicting that. So I don’t think he has been honest. But I think there’s also some of the emails that we got from Freedom of Information Act, say, between he and Dr. Collins that if this came from the lab, it wouldn’t be good for science.

So there’s already sort of this conjecture out there among their emails that we need to make sure people don’t believe this came from the lab because it won’t be good for science. But what they mean by that is, “It won’t be good for our funding and our enormous salaries that we take from government.” So, yes, I think he’s self-interested. I think they’re all conflicted in interest. And when I had a hearing recently on gain-of-function, all three scientists said that we should be treating this type of research the same way we treat nuclear secrets.

So if you make centrifuges to enrich uranium, you can’t just go on eBay and sell them to Iran or Russia or China. We don’t allow that. We have controls, export controls on nuclear technology. All three of these scientists agreed that we should have export controls on DNA technology and that we shouldn’t willy-nilly just put it up on the internet and say, “Hey, guys! I just took a 50% mortality virus, and I made it aerosolized so it can infect people through the air.” That’s the kind of stuff that’s being published with no oversight of whether or not if that gets into the wrong hands, whether that would be knowledge that might be devastating for the world.

BUCK: Dr. Paul, you’re also… Well, I just said it. You’re a doctor as well as a senator. A lot of people — I would certainly people myself high on this list — are very disappointed in how few medical doctors came forward during this to say things like masking up children outside on the ground during school hours when it’s 30 degrees during lunch is child abuse, is crazy; you shouldn’t do this.

You know, double masking kids for eight hours a day in school. We could go through the list all day. How do you think we start to turn that around? Because I know a lot of people have lost faith, certainly in institutional medicine. I mean, they may like their own GP — and, you know, I like my GP, and there are people who have been honest in the medical profession throughout this. But institutions, big hospitals, big nedical research agencies seem like they’ve just fallen down on the job.

SEN. PAUL: Let me get this straight. You guys are trying to tell me that when they took the nets off the basketball goals outside, that that didn’t save anybody’s life?

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Apparently not.

SEN. PAUL: I mean, this is… In the fourteenth century, they would have laughed although some of the stupid stuff we did. Police tape on the jungle gym?

BUCK: Yep.

SEN. PAUL: You know, beating up people outside who are playing outside, you know, with their children. Ridiculous. In Louisville, in my state, as of today, they’re putting kids in masks. There is no science behind that. One, the kids have already had it. And this is a question I’ve asked Fauci. “If my child has already had covid, what’s the chance that he goes to the hospital or a dies from getting it again?” I think the answer is zero. I don’t think there’s been a case reported of somebody who’s already had covid who got it again and died, a child.

There may… There are some adults, but even that’s unusual. But the thing is, there’s absolutely no reason, if your child has had covid, one, to force an inoculation on him, and, two, to put a mask on him. And the death rate from the severe covid — from the first round, the wild type — was about one in two million. It’s less than that now. I think it is approaching zero, the death rate for kids. And, you know, we can’t let these people continue to rule our lives. They’re not making their decisions based on science. It’s pseudoscience. And it’s really their predilection for control of other humans, their predilection for the Nanny State that overrides any sense of any kind of understanding of science.

BUCK: Just real quick, Dr. Paul, whenever I go into a doctor’s office now or I had to visit a family member in the hospital, they still act like the mask is super important, and that dramatically undermines my belief that these are intelligent human beings. So what can we do about this?

SEN. PAUL: It’s not that the masks are important. Their pay is important. The government won’t pay ’em if they don’t wear a mask. So all these people, it’s being mandated for masks. Now, I know some doctors who are defying them, but most doctors are afraid of — it’s like a bank. So if you go in the bank and it’s a really stupid rule but they threaten the bank with taking their license away, the bank adheres turnover stupid rule you give them. Same with doctors.

If you threaten to take away their ability to charge Medicare, which is half of the public is on Medicare — half the people going to doctors or more, depending on your specialty — the doctors will comply. Not one of these doctors believes in masks. I talked to them all the time. I used to be a member of a clinic here in town with over a hundred doctors. Every one of them will tell me they’re sick and tired of it and they’re trying to get rid of it why is it they’re being told that they won’t pay them. The government will not pay you if you don’t wear a mask.

CLAY: We’re talking to Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky as he points out Louisville, fantastic city, but, man, they are run by idiots, having to wear masks — kids still — in school there. Senator, Buck and I started off the show talking about this. Long range, historical verdict on Fauci. We talk about the short-term, the testimony, holding him accountable, the origins of covid, all of that investigation that has to take place. But a decade from now, when some of the passions of the moment — Trump, Biden, Fauci — are much less likely to still be on the political stage, what is the verdict of Dr. Fauci and his response to covid as we move beyond the passions of the present and history starts to render a verdict? What, in your mind, would that look like?

SEN. PAUL: Well, because of his obsessiveness with the idea that he is “science” and that criticism of him is a criticism of science, I think he’s put us back several decades, and he’s also harmed objective criticism. The biggest problem is this. This pandemic was enormously disruptive, and I have friends who died. So people did die from this. But it had a death rate of about 1%, maybe a little bit less overall.

What we’re going to find is that if we do not analyze where this came from, a virus could escape a lab, because they’re experimenting on viruses that have 50% mortality. There’s evidence that the Chinese lab — we have found evidence in sample, that they — may have been doing specialties, Nipah, n-i-p-a-h. It’s a virus that has 60% mortality. And if you’re monkeying around with that and trying to make it aerosolized or try to make it more transmissible, it’s a death wish for civilization.

So I think — I hope this is not true, but — his legacy may be that he looked the other way, did not fully investigate this pandemic research of creating these viruses out of nothing. And, God forbid, that we get another one of these that’s even worse out of a lab in the next decade or so. God forbid, we get like what happened in the fourteenth century where a third of Europe died. So, no. I think this is incredibly important. The Democrats are completely incurious. I finally got a hearing in a subcommittee on gain-of-function research, and none of the Democrats came. It’s hard for me to imagine why they would have no curiosity as to where this virus came from.

BUCK: Senator Rand Paul, we really appreciate your time, sir, and your voice on this issue. Thank you so much.

SEN. PAUL: Thanks, guys.