Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, asserts that the employment status of Dr. Anthony Fauci is suspect.

On December 31, Fauci formally departed from his position as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. During an interview on the Fox News program “Hannity” on Tuesday, Paul suggested that this may not be the case.

“There’s a massive cover-up going on, and the lead in all of the cover-up has been Fauci,” Paul said.

“We now have information that he’s still working for government, even though he says he’s retired,” he continued.

Paul provided his explanation of what he has discovered.

“It is my belief that he is worried about being indicted, and so he continues to work, so he will get legal protection under the federal government,” Paul said.

“This is wrong on every level of it, and we are going to get to the bottom of it. We are sending a letter to find out what the actual status of his employment is. Is he retired? Is he still getting a federal detail?”

Paul noted that he has many concerns about COVID-19 and its origins and treatment and that “At the top of every sort of concern we have it’s Tony Fauci.”

In an interview with Jesse Watters of Fox News, Paul stated that Fauci’s position as head of an organization that awards government money constituted a severe conflict of interest.

Paul said in a Fox News opinion piece that the agency led by Fauci must be changed to end a scenario he compared to J. Edgar Hoover’s lengthy reign at the FBI.

@RandPaul on Fauci cashing in off the Covid vaccine: $400 million in total goes to the NIH and even if it’s goes back out in grants, it’s still self-interested. Fauci was in charge of dispensing all this money while being a policy maker. pic.twitter.com/7DjXvinvHk

— Jesse Watters Primetime (@jesseprimetime) March 23, 2023

“We now know Dr. Fauci used his perch atop the nation’s biodefense research apparatus to finance gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses in China. In doing so, he bypassed a security protocol to screen out projects that posed too much risk,” he wrote.

Paul stated that he has proposed legislation to separate the agency Fauci oversaw into three groups and ensuring that the leaders of each area serve for no more than ten years, with Senate approval required for selections.

“J. Edgar Hoover and Anthony Fauci are two real-life examples of how too much power in too few hands creates an echo chamber where decisions cannot be questioned. But a free and open society depends upon questioning those in power. A people’s trust in science depends upon it, too,” Paul wrote.

During his interview on “Hannity,” Paul discussed the higher risk of myocarditis – an inflammation of the heart — among some recipients of the COVID vaccination.

“You have to weigh the risk and benefit. … If you are over 65 or over 70, the risk of the disease, at least for the last couple years, has been much greater than any perceived or any real risk of the vaccine, I believe that,” Paul said

“But if you are younger, the risks of the vaccine, even though they’re rare, can actually exceed the risk of the disease,” he said.

“We’ve got universities mandating three vaccines,” Paul said. “I think that’s malpractice because the risk of the myocarditis increases with each vaccine. There’s a lot of compromises that could happen here: one vaccine, no vaccine if your kid’s already had it. But instead, the government says do as you’re told, don’t think about this, don’t listen to any dissent, just do as you are told. And that’s a recipe for bad medicine and really malpractice.”