Senator Rand Paul criticizes Trump for claiming he lacked the power to dismiss Fauci amid the pandemic.

Sen. Rand Paul Criticizes Trump for Keeping Fauci

In a recent interview, former President Donald Trump claimed that he could not fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. However, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) disagrees, stating that even if Trump’s claim were true, there was no reason why Fauci had to be put in charge of managing the U.S. government’s response to the pandemic.

“He should not be so proud of keeping Fauci around,” Paul told Fox News host Jesse Watters. “Fauci was a menace to the truth. Talk about a fount of misinformation, it’s Anthony Fauci. More misinformation came out of the government than any other source. So he should have fired him.”

When asked about Fauci’s potential role in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, Paul expressed his belief that Fauci’s presence may have an impact due to his continued involvement.

“There may be civil service rules about actually firing him, but there’s no reason he had to head up the pandemic committee, the COVID Committee,” Paul explained. “So he was on the committee. In fact, if not the lead, he was the committee with the vice president. They met all the time.”

Trump’s Power to Fire Fauci

Under federal civil service law, Trump did not have the power to directly fire Fauci, although he could have ordered political appointees to begin termination proceedings if they had cause, according to CNN. Trump could have diminished Fauci’s role in press briefings and the making and implementation of COVID policy, however.

Paul also claimed that Fauci pushed out then-CDC Director Robert Redfield from the committee, who Paul believed was “the one sane voice on the committee.”

“The one thing that could have saved thousands of lives before the vaccine was that the nurses and the assistants and the people taking care of people in the nursing home, we should have put people in those positions who had already been infected and recovered, knowing that naturally acquired immunity would then protect those senior citizens from getting infected,” Paul argued. “And we never did that because Fauci kept saying, ‘well, we’re not sure, we’re not sure.’

“Well, immunity, we are pretty certain of,” Paul added. “That’s what vaccines are based on, his naturally acquired immunity from the disease. We try to simulate that with a vaccine. So — but by denying it, I think many lives were cost, and there would have been a better way, I think, under the Trump administration to marginalize and push Fauci out of the spotlight and keep his nonsense and his misinformation from infecting the rest of us.”

WATCH:

Sen. @RandPaul rips Trump for keeping Fauci around:

“He should not be so proud of keeping Fauci around. Fauci was a menace to the truth. Talk about a fount of misinformation. It’s Anthony Fauci. More misinformation came out of the government than any other source, so he should… pic.twitter.com/7PgKg1AnQj

— Scott Morefield (@SKMorefield) June 21, 2023

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