Yesterday Democrats were reminded that Senator Rand Paul is also a doctor and he's not messing around.
Besides being an experienced medical doctor he's also a survivor of the coronavirus.
Considering his personal experience with both the medical industry & COVID19 it's safe to assume he's qualified to spar with Dr Anthony Fauci if he happens to disagree with the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during Senate testimony on reopening schools and yesterday that's exactly what happened.
“Shouldn’t we at least be discussing what the mortality of children is?” Paul asked Fauci, adding that "the mortality between [ages] 0 and 18 in New York approaches zero. … So, really, we do need to be thinking about that. We need to observe with an open mind what went on in Sweden, where the kids kept going to school.”
“I hope that people who are predicting doom and gloom and saying, ‘Oh, we can’t do this. There’s going to be the surge,’ will admit that they were wrong if there isn't a surge. Because I think that's what's going to happen,” the senator continued, adding, “I think the ‘one size fits all,’ that we’re going to have a national strategy and nobody’s going to go to school, is kind of ridiculous. We really ought to be doing it school district by school district.”
“As much as I respect you, Dr. Fauci, I don’t think you’re the end-all. I don’t think you’re the one person that gets to make a decision,” Paul concluded. “But if we keep kids out of school for another year, what’s going to happen is the poor and underprivileged kids … are not going to learn for a full year.”
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, top right, speaks via teleconference during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, May 12, 2020. Amid the sharpest downturn in U.S. history, President Donald Trump has been pressing to begin relaxing the lockdowns that have shuttered businesses despite warnings from some public health experts that doing so too quickly risks a further spread of the virus. Photographer: Win McNamee/Getty Images/Bloomberg via Getty Images