Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky tore into COVID-19 hypocrites like California Democrats Gavin Newsom and Eric Garcetti during a Thursday interview with The Daily Signal, encouraging Americans faced with vaccine mandates to engage in peaceful protest. 

Newsom, the governor of California; Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles;  and San Francisco Mayor London Breed drew heavy criticism for taking photos without masks at a recent California football game. 

Paul mocked Garcetti’s defense to reporters that he wore his mask the entire game and held his breath when he took photographs. 

“The question, if we could get Eric in for an interview, would be to ask the mayor of Los Angeles, are you going to hold your breath for four and a half hours during the Super Bowl,” said Paul. “Are you going to put that mask on in between holding [your] breath?”

“I mean, just the insanity of it all, they just give it up,” he continued. “These mandates are wrongheaded. All these people get caught going somewhere because nobody can live that way…It’s theater, but they deserve all of the derision and accusations of hypocrisy.”

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Democratic activist Stacey Abrams also drew fire Tuesday after photographs surfaced showing her posing maskless in a room full of masked children. 

“Maybe she was holding her breath,” Paul joked of Abrams. “I don’t know… she was just being dishonest about it.”

The Republican senator also weighed in on the Canadian “Freedom Convoy” following an NBC News report that a similar trucker convoy may form for this weekend’s Super Bowl in Los Angeles. Such a convoy could potentially come to Washington, D.C., for the State of the Union address in early March, the report said. 

“I’m all for it,” Paul said of the possibility that trucker convoys will form in the United States. “Civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in our country, from slavery to civil rights, you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates.” 

“And some of this, we started,” he added. “We put [COVID-19] mandates on truckers coming across the border from Canada so then they put mandates on, and the truckers are annoyed. They’re riding in a cab by themselves, most of them for eight, 10-hour long hauls, and they just want to do what they want to do. It’s their own business.”

The Biden administration will never admit that they were wrong on their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, Paul said. 

“[President Joe] Biden went out on a limb and accused President [Donald] Trump of being directly responsible for like 300,000, 400,000 deaths…Well, now more people have died under the first year of Biden, do you think he’s going to accept the responsibility for that?” 

“That’s why they have to pivot away,” he continued. “If we get to November 2022 and this is all about COVID, people are unhappy with the mandates, they also see we’ve had more deaths under Biden than Trump, they’re like, why did we elect this guy?”

Biden’s favorability with the American people is plummeting, Paul said, and Americans are starting to “say what many on the right said all along: that many of the deaths that are being recorded are dying with COVID, not from COVID.” 

He continued: “We gave the hospitals a financial incentive to record them as COVID, and guess what? If people pay you to do something, people will do it. And our numbers are higher than the rest of the world, because I think we overreport the deaths from COVID.”

The Kentucky senator, who is a doctor, said that he finds COVID-19 vaccine mandates for healthcare professionals “even more repulsive.” 

“The thing is that most of the doctors and nurses worked throughout COVID for over a year with no vaccine available,” he explained. “Many of them got COVID, some of them died, but many of them survived COVID.”

“It should be incumbent upon the people who want to do the mandate to prove that they need to be vaccinated,” Paul continued. 

The senator called it the “height of hypocrisy” that COVID-19 positive doctors and nurses were continuing to work while unvaccinated medical professionals were prohibited from serving patients. 

“Which would you rather have? A doctor who’s actually coughing up COVID or a doctor that’s already had it from two years ago, doesn’t have a vaccine, but isn’t sick,” he asked. 

“We’re actually letting sick doctors with COVID work as opposed to letting someone unvaccinated work,” he continued. “It’s just insane that they do things they say [are] based on science, but they’re really actually ignoring the science.”

A chief offender in this area is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, according to Paul. The senator accused Fauci, a top adviser to the government on the pandemic,  of spreading harmful disinformation on the coronavirus, saying,  “He should be fired. He should be let go immediately.” 

“Much of the disinformation that he’s put forward is actually harmful,” Paul said, referring to Fauci’s guidance on masks and natural immunity. 

“He’s completely ignored the immunity you get from having had the disease, but in doing so, he doesn’t think we have enough immunities,” Paul said. “Now he wants to force vaccines on newborns and little kids.” 

“What we need to do now is concentrate on the breakthroughs of people who get sick, still usually age, or being overweight,” he added. “Let’s help those people. There’s a lot of treatment out there. Let people know you need to get the treatment sooner rather than later.” 

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