Rand Paul slams Fauci for vaccine bias, blames top doc for thousands of deaths

Sen. Rand Paul is escalating his long-running feud with Dr. Anthony Fauci, saying America's top infectious disease doctor's bias toward vaccines over therapeutics has cost thousands of lives.

"I would venture to say that thousands of people die in our country every month now from COVID because he deemphasized the idea that there are therapeutics," the Kentucky Republican, who also is an ophthalmologist, told the Ron Paul Liberty Report on Monday.

Speaking to his father and former congressman Ron Paul, Rand Paul cited Fauci's long quest for an AIDS vaccine as an example of his bias.

"I think Fauci is of the philosophy that vaccines are incredibly successful and are the way to go versus therapeutics, for example," Paul said. "So with regard to AIDS, he was involved as the AIDS epidemic came up, he wanted to develop a vaccine.

"There's nothing wrong with that. He wanted to develop a vaccine. Vaccines can be great for polio or smallpox or wonderful. It didn't actually work for AIDS," he added.

Fauci did not immediately respond to Paul's criticisms but in the past has dismissed such comments as anti-science "noise."

"Anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this, so if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about," Fauci said a few weeks ago. "But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well people can recognize that there’s a person there, so it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science."