BUCK: We’ve got our friend Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky with us now to talk about this as well as covid, the CDC, and all the rest of it. Senator Paul, we always appreciate you making time for us.

SEN. PAUL: Thanks for having me, guys.

BUCK: Let’s just start with, what do you think happens now in Ukraine? We just had Putin giving his address. He said Ukraine is historically part of Russia. He is recognizing these self-declared independent regions of effectively the Donbass area of eastern Ukraine as, well, independent, really part of Russia in this context. So what do you think happens here, Senator Paul? What do you see going on?

SEN. PAUL: Yeah, I think it’s the same recipe as what they did in Georgia. If they quickly move in and occupy that part of Ukraine, it’s difficult following to conceive of anybody dislodging them. I think the bitterness and the civil war that will ensue, though, won’t end quickly. I think Ukraine is more formidable than Georgia. They may not be able to dislodge Russians, but I think there’s going to be more war than many people would like to see.

The only people that really economically had the ability to punish Putin is Europe, and the question is whether or not Germany will actually make their resolve known. You know, they said they would do — they would not let them use natural gas as a weapon. They weren’t explicit about turning off Nord Stream 2, but we’ll see what they do. If they do very little, I think it just emboldens Putin more.

CLAY: Senator, that’s obviously breaking right now, major story with Ukraine. But I’m sure you read the New York Times had a story that is getting a lot of attention, finally getting around to covering the fact that the CDC is not release be all of the data that they have relating to the covid vaccine, relating to covid overall. I’m sure you read that piece. What was your reaction to it? What can we do to hold the CDC more accountable in terms of sharing this information, which is so necessary to allow us to have the best possible public policy?

SEN. PAUL: I would describe it as dishonesty. They have a conclusion they’ve come to, and it’s universal vaccination, and so they don’t want to have anything that contradicts the narrative. And really that’s dishonesty. That’s not science. That truly is dishonesty. So, part of the things they’ve been withholding is that the group of 18-year-olds to 49-year-olds basically a booster doesn’t seem to help them at all, that they’re fine without a booster. I think this is also true under 18 as well.

But they just want universal vaccination. They don’t want it two times. They want it three or four or five times, and by golly the facts don’t matter, and if the facts get in the way of what they want done, what their policy prescription is, they’ll hide the facts. The same is true with previously infected people. So I’m unvaccinated but previously infected. They finally released something about three weeks ago that says that the chances of me going to the hospital are 55 times less than someone who hasn’t had the disease, but also 2-1/2 times less than someone who’s been vaccinated but hasn’t had the disease.

So they’ve been dishonest about previous infections. They’re being dishonest about boosters, and I think it leads to more hesitancy. You wonder why some people don’t trust the government and think the vaccine might do all these bad things to them? It’s because the government isn’t honest (laughing) so they distrust the government even more because of this dishonesty.

BUCK: Speaking to Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Senator, as just a follow-up to what you’re discussing there with the data, the numbers when it comes to covid, natural immunity, the protection that is given or not really given to those who are at low risk, because it’s so low that — the protection they have is so low that — it wouldn’t even statistically show up, it seems now that we’re at a place that the federal government under the Biden administration as well as many state governments have fired thousands of people — including medical personnel, including members of the military, law enforcement officers, from their jobs — when there was no scientific basis for those firings, as in those individuals in many cases if they had natural immunity would have been safe or safer to be around than the vaccinated, and in other cases they were at low risk and therefore no different in terms of the risk they pose to people around them because of their age. Is it fair to say that these people were fired for no actual scientific reason but for policy and political reasons?

SEN. PAUL: Without question — and, see, I told the security team protecting President Trump early on that what they should do is put people around him… This is before the vaccine was available. I said put people around him who have already recovered from the disease, and you have a barrier to the disease. They’ll be the best protection. It’s the same with hospitals and nurses. If they’ve already had the disease, they’re actually better than somebody who’s been vaccinated.

To show you how grotesque this is, in the recent Omicron, we had so many doctors and nurses sick, they were sending them back to work while they were still shedding (laughs) the virus and just saying, “Oh, wear a mask.” Meanwhile, they had fired people who had immunity who weren’t getting sick again who could have helping in this instance. But it’s really about this impulse to authoritarianism, and it’s in the medical establishment as well as the political establishment, but it’s awful. I meet nurses every day around Kentucky — and doctors — who’ve been let go from their jobs even though they’ve already had covid because they didn’t think it was wise to get vaccinated.

CLAY: Senator Paul, what should happen in your mind going forward at this point? I know we got the State of the Union on March 1st. Buck and I are down in Florida right now. We continue the ridiculousness of having to put the kabuki theater masks on when we get on airplanes. Let me just ask you that directly. How do we end masking in both schools and airplanes as such a huge signifier of a lack of normalcy in our country? I know some kids are able to, some kids are still not — and also do away with this absurd mandate for airports as well?

SEN. PAUL: First of all, realize the airlines lie to you every time you get on the plane. They get on the loudspeaker, and they say, “This is mandated by federal law.” That is not true. Laws are passed by legislatures and signed by the president. The mask mandate came from the CDC, and the CDC has no power to tell you to wear a mask on a plane. They do not have that power. They were never given that power. The CDC also was the organization that said you don’t have to pay your rent or your car payment if covid’s bothering you.

And the courts have struck that down. So for the airline to say that, oh, this is a federal law? It’s not a federal law. But I am putting forward — because it’s a regulation that was put forward by the CDC. When I get back, not this week, but next week, I’m gonna force a vote on overturning that regulation by the CDC. It’s a privilege vote so it will happen. I think we’ll get every Republican to vote for it. The question is when are the Democrats gonna, you know, realize how much the public hates these mandates and also doesn’t believe that the masks work?

BUCK: Senator Paul, is it possible to reform the health bureaucracies at the federal level at least for this country so that we wouldn’t see something like this again? What is your — what is your desire going forward as a policy maker — as a legislator, I should say, both — to actually deal with the fact that the CDC has lost a lot and should have lost a lot of people’s confidence over the course of this pandemic for what seemed like obvious political reasons?

SEN. PAUL: Yeah, it’s not just the CDC. It’s infiltrated all over the groupthink of hospitals and universities, and the most important thing that your listeners can do is, if your loved one gets sick, don’t just blindly go in there and say, “Oh, do whatever you think is best.” Ask the doctor questions, ask the doctor for alternatives, discuss the alternatives, read up on it yourself, because they’re not being honest with us, and then the doctors are basing this on the information they’re getting from the CDC.

The one thing that Fauci could have said that would have saved tens of thousands of lives — and he’s never said this — is the monoclonal antibodies work but you have to get in soon. He’s too busy with his head stuck in the sand saying, “Oh, everybody’s gotta be vaccinated, we gotta grab your newborn and vaccinate him before they leave the hospital,” instead of saying, “Look. You might get sick if you’re not been vaccinated, you’re probably a little bit less likely to go to the hospital if you’ve been vaccinated.

“But if you get sick with either one of them, you have to be treated in the first several days as you’re getting sick or if you’re at high risk either through age or weight or other diseases.” I never hear that from him. The only person that really prioritized this was a few Republican governors. Namely, Ron DeSantis down in Florida probably saved thousands of people’s lives by making monoclonal antibodies very available.

CLAY: Senator Paul, what do you expect…? You just mentioned Dr. Fauci. We’ve been arguing on this show, and I want to reiterate it as well, you need to give the Democrats a real whipping and hold them responsible in the House and the Senate in the midterms coming up for what they have done and the failures they have implemented. But what do you expect to see from Dr. Fauci as we get closer to the spring, summer? Do you expect him to retire? Do you think he’s gonna sit around and allow himself to remain a government employee with the House potentially and the Senate flipping back to Republican control? What’s his game plan here?

SEN. PAUL: I don’t know for certain, but I can’t imagine that he’ll say through the election because the writing’s on the wall that I believe Republicans will take either the House or the Senate or both, and I’ve already pledged that if I’m chairman of a committee after November, I will use every resource and leave no stone unturned to investigate where this virus came from. We’ll interview the scientists who tried to cover it up, that includes Fauci, a lot of his colleagues. The email trails that are all redacted, we’re gonna get to it.

We will see every one of those emails and we’re gonna see all the words, not redacted form. We’re gonna see what went on and why they chose to cover it up. Some of it we already know. Fauci and Collins went back and forth saying (summarized), “This will damage science. We are science, and it’ll damage government, and it’ll damage people’s belief in that government is doing the right thing.” So they basically told us it didn’t come from the lab and it had to come from nature ’cause they didn’t want to damage WHO, China. They don’t want to hurt the feelings of the Chinese scientists, and they didn’t want us to know that they’d been funding this research in China.

BUCK: Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Senator, we always appreciate you, sir. Thanks for being with us.

SEN. PAUL: Thanks, guys.