Dr. Peter Hotez is next to one of the country’s top doctors after a confrontation between Republican Senator Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci on Capitol Hill over masks.
“Dr. Fauci is absolutely right, Senator Paul is absolutely wrong and this is how it has been for the past 14 months,” said Hotez.
Paul said that people are not at risk of contracting Covid after recovering or being vaccinated and therefore do not need to wear masks. The Kentucky senator also said that Fauci was wearing two masks simply to show off.
The White House chief medical advisor emphatically rejected Paul’s comments on Thursday, during a Senate hearing examining the country’s coronavirus response efforts.
“I can only declare for the record that masks are not theater,” said Fauci. “I totally disagree with you.”
In an interview on Thursday night in “The News with Shepard Smith”, Hotez noted that eventually “the masks may need to be removed”, but that it is too early and “we are still trying to understand all the performance characteristics of the vaccines” .
“We are only now realizing that it interrupts asymptomatic transmission,” said Hotez.
The debate about the masks occurs when almost half of the country is facing an increase in the cases of Covid. Twenty-three states reported an increase in cases, as an average of seven days, last week, according to Johns Hopkins. Half a dozen states are also experiencing an upward trend in hospitalizations, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Vaccine Development Center, told presenter Shepard Smith that the peaks could be the result of new highly transmissible variants.
“The key now is to vaccinate before variants as quickly as possible,” said Hotez.