CLAY: I believe we are joined now by Senator Rand Paul, who you just heard absolutely lacerating Dr. Fauci over natural immunity and more. Senator Paul, thanks for joining us. Where does this all go from here? Fauci’s claiming that he’s gonna retire at the end of the year. He’s clearly been caught, as you played for him, in a lie, about the impact of natural immunity. They don’t seem to be willing to share a pretty simple question: How many people involved in okaying the covid shot had a relationship with Pfizer, with Moderna, with J&J, with any of these pharmaceutical companies? When are we gonna start to get some of these answers in earnest? What happens now?

SEN. PAUL: You know, they’ve been resisting. They’ve been resisting from the very beginning. I’ve been asking them for months: “Is anybody on the vaccine committee who received royalties from the companies that make the vaccines?” And I asked this a month ago to Fauci and his response was (chuckles), “I’m not gonna tell you, and you can’t make me,” and he cited a law from 1980 that says he’s not — he is not and can’t be forced to divulge this. But think about it.

Think of somebody on your local school board also sold text messages to the school. How awful would it be if they didn’t divulge that it was their company that was bidding on the contract, and they were on the school board and voting on that? None would ever Carlton that. But what shocks me is this is going on in Washington. Y ou know, one of these companies made $36 billion last quarter. And it’s like, we’re not going to admit whether anybody on the committee receives royalties from that company? I mean, that is bizarre to my mind that that’s defensible. You would think it would be on the front page of every newspaper and every journalist in Washington would be clamoring to find out the truth and they’d be at the doorstep of the CEO asking this stuff, and at the FDA. And not one quiver, not one quibble. Nobody seems to care.

BUCK: Senator Paul, you know, there’s still some institutions, some universities that are requiring boosters for this fall. So this is not an issue that is over just even with mandatory covid vaccination. Fauci, you talked to him a little bit about natural immunity. Do you think that there’s going to be some change, at least, in the way that the CDC going forward speaks about covid shots so that everybody’s gonna realize that these mandates that some schools and other places have are crazy? I mean, I had a family member who was told that she had to show a vaccination passport to get into a school recently.

SEN. PAUL: Well, think about it this way. Eighty percent of our kids have had covid. So the real question is: If you’ve had covid, does that protect you? Well, if the CDC’s not going to put out the data and not going to be honest about it, how do you make a rational decision as a university or a parent? So this is awful. When they approved recently boosters for children, they didn’t prove that it prevented hospitalization or death. They just said, “If we give this to your kid, your kid will make antibodies.” Well, that doesn’t prove that your kid needs another vaccine. If that’s the proof we’re gonna use, I can give your kid a hundred vaccines and he’ll make antibodies every time, but that doesn’t prove your kid needs a hundred vaccines.

CLAY: Senator Paul, I don’t know if you heard, but I was comparing the covid shot to almost like the lemon law. A lot of people out there are familiar with this. You go buy a used car, you start to drive it, it doesn’t work; you can take it back and there are laws to govern this sort of purchase all over the place. It seems quite clear that the American taxpayer was sold a bill of goods with these covid shots. They have not done what we were told they would do.

If the federal government hadn’t already granted mass immunity — you well know, Senator Paul — there would be plaintiff lawyers filing lawsuits left and right against all these drug companies, and the companies would face tens of billions of dollars in liability. Why shouldn’t the U.S. government be able to go after them? You just mentioned $36 billion in profits. They mandated these vaccines, the government did, they mandated that we were going to purchase them from these companies. How in the world can we let these companies make tens of billions of dollars off a product that isn’t working like they told us it would work, all taxpayer funded?

SEN. PAUL: This is sort of the question that goes on a lot where we sort of, you know, distribute the profits individually to companies but we socialize the risk. We all took the risk, we all did the investment, we gave all the money to these companies, and they get to internalize privately the profit. And that is a real question that we have. The same has happened also — and a lot of people haven’t talked about this. But think about insurance companies. Eighty percent of our country has private insurance. That insurance would have paid for your vaccines and for your care but since the government bought it, your insurance company was off the hook. Your insurance company didn’t have pay for any of those medicines required, and that really ended up being a private subsidy to the insurance companies well.

BUCK: Senator Rand Paul is with us right now from Kentucky. And, Senator Paul, do you think that there is going to be any accountability for the people who made the wrong decisions here, whether it’s within the bureaucracy…? I know Fauci’s trying to flee right before Republicans might at least take control of the House, perhaps the Senate. But also on a political level, I mean, are you hearing from people that they understand the only chance you really have to have any accountability at a political level is this midterm election?

SEN. PAUL: I think you’re right in that it’s a sad state of affairs. I think people are angry about it. They see a double standard. If you’re a supporter of Donald Trump and they can accuse you of lying to Congress, they’ll send 25 armed agents to pull you out in your underwear and handcuff you in front of cameras. But if you’re, you know, somebody that’s on the other side, you know, Fauci has lied repeatedly to Congress; we got him in a lie. James Clapper lied about the snooping program he was in charge of, snooping on Americans, metadata. Nothing happened to him.

So this is what’s distressing to people. They think that there are two types of justice: One if you’re a conservative or Republican and another if you’re part of the establishment or the government elite. No, it is sad. But if we do win the election, mine isn’t a vendetta on Dr. Fauci. Mine is to get to the bottom of where the virus came from and make sure that it doesn’t happen again. I think we’re at risk for something much bigger. The final death tally for covid is about 0.3% mortality. That’s bad, but they’re experimental with viruses that have 60% mortality.

This could be something so destructive that it would threaten our very civilization. This is not just my word; this is coming from MIT scientists who are worried about this, and they say this research should be regulated the same way we regulate centrifuges. So if you don’t want somebody in Nashville making centrifuges and selling them to Iran — we have laws against that — maybe we shouldn’t be selling DNA synthesizers to foreign countries, particularly totalitarian foreign countries. Maybe we shouldn’t be sending them labs with… We shouldn’t be sending mice with human lungs to the Chinese as well so they can modify things to be injected into humans. So there’s a great deal that needs to be discussed, and Democrats have showed absolutely no curiosity. Not one hearing on the origin of the virus. Not one hearing on whether or not we should regulate this research.

CLAY: God. This is… It’s scary stuff, honestly. And we’re talking to Rand Paul, Senator from Kentucky, also a doctor. When you see that the FDA, CDC, all these people have okayed a booster based on, my understanding is, a test on eight mice, we know how much has already been wrong about the covid shot, Senator. How in the world is there any way to justify continuing to okay new versions of the shot when we know that it didn’t work very well in the past and we’re still not even testing it very adequately before we start injecting it again?

SEN. PAUL: I’m a believer that the American people are much smarter than they’re given credit for, that the public is smarter than the “experts.” Ninety-five percent of parents are not giving this vaccine to the kids right now. It’s a very small number of kids that are taking this vaccine, particularly the third vaccine. And so people are smarter than we give them credit for, but it is a disgrace that the powers that be are pushing, prodding, getting schools to develop…

You know, schools in New York, they said, “If you’re not vaccinated next year, you’re just — you know what? — out of luck. You’re not gonna be taught at home. You’re not gonna be taught in person. We just don’t care at all about you,” all based on no science whatsoever. In all likelihood, the preponderance of scientific evidence says that if you’ve been infected, you are better protected than any number of vaccines. And that is probably the truth of the science as we see it, and yet we’re still telling people that have been infected that they have no protection. We’re not even asking! Do you know of any school district that’s asking whether you you’ve had it, if you’ve been infected you don’t have to go through some rigmarole with masks and vaccines? No. They’re just demanding everything submit based on no science.

BUCK: Senator Paul, you’ve probably seen, I’m sorry, some of the early studies that are out there, I guess it’s preprints and different medical journals, but there’s starting to be more of a body of evidence out there that the shots might have more ill effects over the long-term than certainly we were led to believe. How concerned are you about that? When you look at the side-effects and look at especially the side-effect of multiple doses beyond anything we were told would be necessary from the start, are you worried about some of these studies that indicate that there could be some really negative consequences to these shots that we were told no way it would happen?

SEN. PAUL: Absolutely. And to me it’s always risk versus benefit and depends on your age. So I’ve never thought there was enough evidence of the risk of this disease for people under 18 that the vaccine — any vaccine for probably — is warranted, but particularly a vaccine if you’ve already had the disease. As you get older, if you’re 75 and you’re 75 pounds overweight, I think you’re at risk for dying from this disease and even the possible risk to the vaccine. I’d tell you to get vaccinated, particularly a year or year and a half ago.

If you’ve already had it, those risk factors, you know, it’s sort of debatable but I’d probably still tell you (chuckles) I would have taken at least one or two vaccines if you’re 75 years old and 75 pounds overweight because those are the risk factors. It’s age and weight. And if you have the double whammy, you really need to be worried. But it’s a different answer for different people based on their risk factors. But what you hear from the government is everybody just needs to submit, and we’re not gonna give you any data on the protection of natural immunity or naturally acquired immunity.

And this is when they lose people. They say, “Oh, conservatives, Republicans, you have all these vaccine hesitancy.” Well, hesitancy comes from lying government officials who won’t tell the truth, and if they were honest, tell us the honest benefits, ’cause even with the possible risks, I think there are certain age and certain overweight individuals that really the risks of the disease still are much greater than the risks of the vaccine.

CLAY: Last question for you, Senator Paul. I’m sure you’ve seen the story that Head Start kids are still being required to wear masks. These are kids in government programs, overwhelmingly young families without a lot of socioeconomic resources. How ridiculous is it that any kid in any school — but particularly young kids — are still being required to wear masks anywhere?

SEN. PAUL: No scientific evidence that it stops the spread. No scientific evidence that it saves lives. But there is evidence that it stifles the ability to learn. There’s evidence that kids are hearing disabilities or speech disabilities or intellectual disabilities have more difficulty learning when they can’t see the faces. For young kids seeing faces is an incredibly important thing. It’s really important to all of us. But, no, it’s been a disaster. But even worse than the masks were not having kids in person. Sweden never did it. Kids stayed in school the entire time, they didn’t wear masks, and no child died in Sweden.

And when they looked at the death rate of the teachers, everybody says, “Oh, they’re gonna kill the teachers! We gotta save the teachers.” The teachers did not have a higher incidence of infection than in general public. So, Sweden turned out to be this role model for what could have happened here, and we have to continue to have this debate because what happens when the next pandemics comes? We need to know that what government did, what primarily Democrat governors did, was a huge mistake and incredibly damaging to our children and particularly to the poorest and least among us who have the most difficult living circumstances, like kids who go early to school for the Head Start. These are the kids that were hurt the worst.

BUCK: Senator Rand Paul, appreciate you making the time for us, sir. Thanks again.

SEN. PAUL: Thanks, guys.