Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (R) laid into coronavirus task force head Dr. Anthony Fauci over his failed central planning one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with the COVID pandemic.“If society meekly submits to an expert, and that expert is wrong, a great deal of harm may occur,” Paul told Fauci during a Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions committee hearing on Tuesday.
Paul quoted Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s “Fatal Conceit,” a classic critique of anti-collectivism.
“Fatal Conceit is the concept that central planning with decision-making concentrated in a few hands can never fully grasp the millions of complex individual interactions occurring simultaneously in the marketplace,” Paul said.
“It is a fatal conceit to believe any one person or small group of people has the knowledge necessary to direct an economy or dictate public health behavior.”
As an example, Paul pointed out Fauci and the medical establishment’s assertion that schools should stay closed despite the mountains of data showing children are at the lowest risk of contracting and spreading the virus due to their healthy immune systems.
“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,” he said.
“All of this body of evidence about schools around the world shows there’s no surge. I mean, we’ve so politicized this and made it politically correct that the WHO releases that it’s rare and you have a scientist up there honestly giving her opinion, and what happens to her? She’s blackballed and the report that she refers to is taken off the website.”
Fauci responded that he does want to see children go back to school in the fall, and criticized the media for presenting some of his opinions about certain matters like sports or travel as government-backed directives.
“When things get in the press of what I supposedly said, I didn’t say,” Fauci told Paul. “I never said ‘we can’t play a certain sport’. What happens, is that people in the sport industry…ask me opinions regarding certain facts about the spread of the virus, what their dynamics are, I give it, and that’s interpreted that I’m saying ‘you can’t play this sport’ or ‘you can’t play that sport.'”
The hearing comes as state and local governments are renewing shutdown directives and mandating masks as COVID-19 cases swell due to increased testing availability.
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