Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday he would do everything in his power to fight back against another possible lockdown under a projected Biden administration, as some of his coronavirus advisers have said may be necessary.
“I’m going to do everything I can to try to prevent Biden from locking us up and locking us down and forcing us to wear masks forever. We can’t go on like this forever,” he told WABC’s “The CATS Roundtable with John Catsimatidis.”
“Today, Biden’s talking more about a lockdown,” Paul added. “This is absolutely why he’s going to be a terrible president if we get him. He’s going to ruin the country. Lockdowns don’t work. And in fact, all of the evidence on mandatory masks show that they don’t work either.”
Indeed, a new Danish study on mask wearing released Wednesday found they are ineffective.
“The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers by more than 50% in a community with modest infection rates, some degree of social distancing, and uncommon general mask use,” the study’s conclusion states.
Paul pointed out places that have implemented mandatory mask rules saw an increase in the infection rate.
“There’s about 10 different countries or venues, maybe 20, that instituted mandatory masks, and every one of them to a T, the infection rate or the COVID rate went up after the mask mandate,” he continued. “Now, this is just showing that … all these mitigation strategies — washing our hands, staying six feet apart — they really don’t work, frankly. And the virus, as the Wall Street Journal put it, is insidious. It does what it’s going to do. The only thing that’s going to stop it is either enough immunity among individuals in the community or a vaccine.”
Pfizer and BioNTech announced Wednesday morning the final analysis from their clinical trial shows the companies' vaccine to be 95 percent effective. Moderna's vaccine demonstrated similar results.
During an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper over the weekend, Dr. Anthony Fauci had a different attitude, saying even after a vaccine, our guards can’t be let down. Mask wearing and social distancing ought to continue, he argued.
"I would recommend to people not to abandon all public health measures because you've been vaccinated because, even though for the general population, it might be 90 to 95 percent effective, you don't necessarily know how – for you – how effective it is," the NIAID director said.