Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday that Dr. Anthony Fauci owes an apology to “every single parent and school-age child” in the country after the White House Coronavirus Task Force member said getting children back in school should be a top priority.
“Dr Fauci owes @RandPaul an apology,” conservative activist Jack Posobiec tweeted.
“No, he owes one to every single parent and school-age child in America,” Mr. Paul, Kentucky Republican, responded.
The comment comes after Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said earlier Sunday that “the default position should be to try as best as possible within reason to keep the children in school or to get them back to school.”
“Close the bars and keep the schools open,” he said.
Conservatives on social media have been treating Dr. Fauci’s comments as a flip-flop, but he has made the same argument in recent weeks. On Nov. 19, he told CNN’s Chris Cuomo, “I think one of the things we need to do is to the best of our capability try to keep the kids in school.”
But Mr. Paul apparently isn’t satisfied. In his criticism of Dr. Fauci on Sunday, the senator shared a June article in which he slammed the doctor and “government experts” as being too powerful.
“Dr. Fauci, every day we seem to hear from you things we can’t do. But when you’re asked, ‘Can we go back to school?’? I don’t hear much certitude at all. ‘Well, maybe.’ ‘It depends.’ Guess what? It’s rare for kids to transmit this. I don’t hear that coming from you. All I hear is, ‘We can’t do this, we can’t do that, we can’t play baseball,’” Mr. Paul said during a June hearing on COVID-19 response, the New York Post reported.
“If you were listening — and I think you were — to my opening statement and my response to one of the questions, I feel very strongly we need to do whatever we can to get the children back to school. I think we’re in lock agreement with that,” Dr. Fauci responded at the time.
I told him this multiple times this summer. https://t.co/LspBtxtU6D
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) November 29, 2020
