Rand Paul: Government doesn't want you free of mandates
Kentucky Republican joins 'Your World' to discuss the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine
"We should not have government mandates based on what we don't know. We should make mandates based on what we do know," Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky, told "Your World" Tuesday.
PAUL: Here's the thing about Dr. Fauci. When they can prove something is a real problem, let's consider a mandate. The last time he [Dr. Fauci] had the pushback with me, he said, "What about the variants? You may have had the infection or may have had the vaccine, but you may be susceptible to the variants." All of the studies so far show the vaccine works well against most of the variants and natural disease works very well against the variants. In fact, a study that came out in January from one of his [Fauci’s] own institutes, one of his scientists said that natural immunity, those that got it the natural way, have immunity to all the variants.
What we need to do is not push fearmongering. Is it perfect? No. The burden should be on government to prove there's widespread -- people that have had it or not getting it by the tens of thousands, or [that] people being vaccinated are still passing it along. Even the CDC admitted, before somebody made them roll it back, but the head of the CDC was on TV saying if you have been vaccinated, we discovered that you're not carrying it, you're not transmitting. This is good news. These people can't stand good news because that means you get out from under their thumb and you can go live your life. They don't want you to be free of their mandates. They like the idea of submission because most of these people, at heart, they are big government people.
So far the good news is that we're finding longstanding T-cell mediated immunity, memory immunity, to people that have had it. There's no big studies showing that we're getting widespread reinfection of those that have had it. It's very, very rare. Thirty-one million people have had it in our country. It's a handful to a couple of hundred that may have been reinfected and no surges related to reinfection. The people [who] get it again, if they do have already got some immunity. They're typically getting a mild form, if they get it again.
Paul also discusses the controversy over Major League Baseball pulling the All-Star game from Atlanta, stating it may be time for Republicans to start boycotting corporations that came out against Georgia election law.
PAUL: Does baseball, the nation's pastime, want to be the pastime for Democrats? Does Coca-Cola only want to sell Coke to Democrats? Does Delta only want to fly Democrats? They've taken a hugely partisan look at this voting law that actually expands access to voting. It does some things to absentee voting, but it expands the early voting. There's more early voting in Georgia than Denver. So what kind of logic or what kind of rule or standard are they using to judge which states we're going to play baseball in?
The way they're treating a Republican-passed bill and the way they're treating Republicans tells me that Coca-Cola doesn't want Republicans to drink their product and Delta doesn't want Republicans on their plane and Major League Baseball doesn't want Republicans in their stadium. If so, they're foolish to anger half of the public by becoming so woke. In the end, they're all going to regret this. Stacey Abrams is backtracking and saying, "I didn't realize it would cost my state $100 million." Losing the Major League All-Star Game cost Georgia $100 million. Stacey Abrams is now responsible for that. Can you imagine that she wants to represent a state that she cost a $100 million contract because of lunacy and lies about the election law that was passed?