What we witnessed recently in a public hearing, as Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) attempted to bully, intimidate, and discredit Dr Anthony Fauci, was a sad development in the ongoing battle against science and reason as we enter the third year of COVID-19.
Throughout the course of the pandemic, Paul and others have continued to raise doubts about the science supporting vaccines, questioned the use of masks, and supported conspiracy theories that claim that Fauci played a part in the appearance of COVID-19. The repeated and ongoing attacks on Fauci, President Biden's chief medical advisor, have intensified over the past several months; consequently, Fauci's security has been increasingly tightened since early 2020.
At that congressional hearing, Fauci demanded to speak uninterrupted after Paul accused him, in a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing, of helping organize and carry out a smear campaign against three conservative academic professionals who were against shutdown policies in 2020. However, the emails Paul was referring to only showed that Fauci sent his contacts a link to a Wired article debunking claims about reaching "herd immunity."
Fauci explained that Paul's ongoing attacks were a misrepresentation of reality and implicated these deceptions and fabrications in generating death threats against him.
