September 23, 2020

Dr. Fauci Pushes Back on Rand Paul’s Pseudoscience

Jennings Graeme/Abaca/Zuma

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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) suggested at Wednesday’s Senate hearing on the federal pandemic response that shutdowns did not curb the spread of the coronavirus. Dr. Anthony Fauci wasn’t having it.

“You’ve lauded New York for their policy,” Paul said during the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions subcommittee hearing. “New York had the highest death rate in the world. How can we possibly be jumping up and down and saying, ‘Oh, Governor Cuomo did a great job’?”

“No, you misconstrued that, senator, and you’ve done that repetitively in the past,” Fauci replied. “They got hit very badly, they made some mistakes. Right now, if you look at what’s going on right now, the things that are going on in New York, to get their test positivity to 1 percent or less, is because they are looking at the guidelines that we have put together from the task force of the four or five things, or masks, social distancing, outdoors more than indoors, avoiding crowds, and washing hands.”

“Or they have developed enough community immunity that they’re no longer having the pandemic because they have enough immunity in New York City to actually stop it,” Paul interjected.

“This happens with Senator Rand all the time,” Fauci said. “You were not listening to what the director of the CDC said, that in New York it’s about 22 percent. If you believe that 22 percent is herd immunity, I believe you’re alone in that.”

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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