At a virtual Senate committee hearing Tuesday on the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., challenged Dr. Anthony Fauci’s belief that this fall might be too soon for schools to reopen.
Paul began his questioning by having Fauci affirm – contrary to the World Health Organization’s claim – there is substantial evidence that, like most infectious diseases, people infected with the coronavirus develop an immunity to it.
The Kentucky senator, a practicing physician, then pointed to data from New York that the case-fatality rate for people infected with the coronavirus is near zero for children and 10 in 100,000 for people ages 18 to 45.
On the issue of going back to school, he told the panel that “left out of the discussion is the mortality.”
“Shouldn’t we at least be discussing what the mortality of children is?” he asked.
Paul said the “one-size-fits-all” national strategy – that “nobody is going to go to school” – “is kind of ridiculous.”
“We really ought to be doing it school district by school district,” he told the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
And the power needs to be disbursed, he said, “because people make wrong predictions.”
“I think it’s going to be a huge mistake if we don’t open up the schools in the fall,” Paul said.
The senator said that in the future, the history of the pandemic will be marked by “wrong prediction after wrong prediction after wrong prediction, starting with Ferguson in England.”
The reference was to Dr. Neil Ferguson’s dire prediction that as many as 2.2 million Americans and 500,000 Britons would die, which Fauci and coronavirus team member Dr. Deborah Birx presented to President Trump to convince him to advise the lockdowns.
“So, I think we really ought to have a little humility, really in our belief that we know what’s best for the economy,” Paul said.
“And 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 who gets to make the decision. We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other side saying there is not going to be a surge, and we can safely open the economy,” he said.
The Kentucky Republican insisted “the facts will bear this out.”
“But if we keep kids out of school for another year, what’s going to happen is the poor and underprivileged kids who don’t have a parent that’s able to teach them at home are not going to learn for a full year,” he warned, advising that the U.S. look at “the Swedish model.”
‘I don’t give advice about economic things’
Fauci asked the chairman, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., for permission to respond to Paul’s remark about him.
Alexander agreed and asked Fauci also to clarify whether or not children should return to school in the fall.
“First of all,” Fauci replied, “Senator Paul, thank you for your comments. I have never made myself out to be the end-all or the only voice in this. I’m a scientist, a physician and a public health official. I give advice according to the best scientific evidence.”
Fauci said there are others who weigh in on the need to reopen the country economically.
“I don’t give advice about economic things. I don’t give advice about anything other than public health.”
He then addressed Paul’s call for humility, saying “we don’t know everything about this virus.”
“And we’ve really got to be careful, particularly when it comes to children,” said Fauci, who has served as the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly 40 years.
Fauci explained that more has been learned since the early studies from China and Europe.
For example, he said, children presenting with COVID-19 have “a very strange inflammatory syndrome very similar to Kawaski syndrome.”
The disease, which primarly affects children under age 5, causes swelling of the heart’s blood vessels.
“I think we’ve gotta be careful, if we are not cavalier, in thinking that children are completely immune to the deleterious effects,” Fauci said.
He affirmed, however, that children do “much, much better” than adults and the elderly, particularly those with underlying conditions.
“Now, I’m very careful, and hopefully humbled, in knowing that I don’t know everything about this disease. And that’s why I’m very reserved in making broad predictions,” Fauci said.
Alexander, the chairman, asked Fauci what he would say to the University of Tennessee chancellor or the principal of a public school “about how to persuade parents and students to return to school in August?””
“I would tell her that, in this case, the idea of having treatments available or a vaccine to facilitate the re-entry of students into the fall term would be something that would be a bit of a bridge too far,” he said.
Fauci said that at issue is “how the student will feel safe in going back to school.”
“If this were a situation where we had a vaccine, that would really be the end of that issue in a positive way,” he said. “But … even at the top-speed we’re going, we don’t see a vaccine playing in the ability of individuals to get back to school this term. What they really want is to know if they are safe. And that’s the question that has to do … with testing.”
‘Observe with an open mind’
Paul said the United States needs “to observe with an open mind what went on in Sweden, where the kids kept going to school.”
He pointed out that Sweden’s coronavirus fatality rate per capita is less than France, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands. And it’s about the same as Switzerland.
“I don’t think any of us are certain when we do this modeling,” he said. “There have been more people wrong with modeling than right.”
Paul pointed out that some states are opening their economies.
“I hope that people who are predicting doom and gloom, saying, ‘Oh, we can’t do this, this is absurd,’ will admit that they were wrong when there isn’t a surge,” he said. “Because I think that’s what’s going to happen.”
Rural states, he pointed out, have not reached pandemic levels, including his state of Kentucky, where the number of coronavirus deaths has been fewer than the average deaths from the flu.
“It’s not to say this isn’t deadly, but, really, outside of New England, we’ve had a relatively benign course for this virus nationwide,” he said.
On April 22, Fauci, along with President Trump, criticized Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s lifting of his state’s lockdown on several high-risk industries such as barbershops and bowling alleys.
On Saturday, however, Kemp announced that 15 days later, the state had counted the fewest hospitalizations and fewest use of ventilators since it began recording the data in April.
‘Not a major threat’
Paul’s point about the changing models and predictions is illustrated in past statements by Fauci.
In an interview April 12 with MSNBC’s Al Sharpton, Fauci said he became aware of the magnitude of the coronavirus outbreak in mid-January.
But in a Jan. 21 interview with Newsmax TV, the White House health adviser said the coronavirus was “not a major threat” to the United States.
Anchor Greg Kelly asked: “Bottom line. We don’t have to worry about this one, right?”
“Obviously, you need to take it seriously, and do the kinds of things that the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security are doing,” Fauci replied.
“But, this not a major threat for the people of the United States, and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.”
In January, Dr Tony Fauci was on my show telling America not to worry about the Coronavirus—that it wasn’t a major threat to the people. January 21, 2020, 20 seconds: pic.twitter.com/RLDivpgbAq
— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) April 3, 2020
More than one month later, in a Feb. 29 “Today” show interview, Fauci was asked: “So, Dr. Fauci, it’s Saturday morning in America. People are waking up now with real concerns about this. They want to go to malls, movies, maybe the gym as well. Should we be changing our habits? And if so, how?
Fauci replied: “No. Right now, at this moment, there is no need to change anything you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.
“Right now the risk is still low, but this could change.”
See the “Today” show remarks:
Fauci: February 29 pic.twitter.com/PxwbdQ5WSu
— Steph (@steph93065) April 12, 2020
On March 9, Fauci told reporters at the daily coronavirus task force briefing at the White House he had no problem with healthy people going on cruises.
“If you are a healthy young person, there is no reason if you want to go on a cruise ship, go on a cruise ship,” he said in response to a question by John Roberts of Fox News.
Further, Fauci co-authored an article published March 26 in the New England Journal of Medicine predicting the case fatality rate for the coronavirus will turn out to be like that of a “severe seasonal influenza.”
In an exceptionally bad flu season, the rate is about one-tenth of 1 percent, the authors wrote.
That assessment was a significant downgrade from the figure Fauci cited in testimony to the House of Representatives on March 11 in which he called for a cancellation of any large gatherings.
Fauci estimated at that time – prior to the current shutdown – that the true mortality rate of the coronavirus outbreak, taking into account unreported cases, was “somewhere around 1%, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.”
The forecast of coronavirus deaths by Neil Ferguson that Fauci and Birx presented to Trump came up at the March 26 White House briefing one day after Ferguson himself dramatically downgraded his estimate in testimony to a British parliamentary committee. Ferguson testified that as few as 10,000 Britons, not 500,000, could die from the coronavirus.
Asked about the downgrade, Dr. Birx said the predictions of models also “don’t match the reality on the ground in either China, South Korea or Italy.”
“Models are models. There’s enough data now of the real experience with the coronavirus on the ground, really, to make these predictions much more sound,” said Birx.
“So when people start talking about 20% of a population getting infected, it’s very scary,” she said. “But we don’t have data that matches that.”