Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said that while “vaccines are one of the greatest medical breakthroughs that we had,” he claims he has heard of children who got mental disorders from vaccines on Monday’s “Closing Bell” on CNBC.

“I think vaccines are one of the greatest medical breakthroughs that we had. I’m a big fan and a great fan of the history of the development of the smallpox vaccine, for example, but for most of our history they have been voluntary. So, I don’t think I’m arguing for anything out of the ordinary, we’re arguing for what most of our history has had” he said.

“I think public awareness of how good vaccines are for kids and how they are good for public health is a great idea, we just appointed a Surgeon General,” he continued. “These are some of the things that are things that we should promote as good for our health, but I don’t think there’s anything extraordinary about resorting to freedom.

“I’ll give you a good example, the Hepatitis B vaccine is now given to newborns. We sometimes give five and six vaccines all at one time. I chose to have my delayed. I don’t want my government telling me that I have to give my new newborn the Hepatitis B vaccine, which is transmitted by sexually transmitted disease and/or blood transfusions… so I had mine staggered over several months. I’ve heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines. I’m not arguing vaccines are a bad idea, I think they’re a good thing, but I think the parent should have some input. The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children and it is an issue of freedom.”

The discussion then turned to Paul’s proposed tax holiday that would allow companies who earn money overseas to bring it back to the US at a one-time corporate rate of 6.5 percent.

After anchor Kelly Evans argued that “most of the research on this indicates that these actually cost more money over the long term than they save, Paul interjected.

“That’s incorrect,” he said. “Your premise and your question is mistaken. Most of the research doesn’t indicate that. In fact, there’s a prominent study by Robert Shapiro looking at the holiday in 2005, when we lowered the rate to five percent. And his conclusion was that it brought $300 billion of new capital home, and then it brought in about $30 billion of new tax revenue. The whole purpose of doing this is to bring money home.”

After trying to keep the floor from Evans, even shushing her at one point and telling her to “calm down,” Paul added, “I’m for permanent. I am for making it permanent. I’d even go lower on the rate, but this is a bipartisan proposal, so I don’t get everything I want, the other side doesn’t get everything they want but this is how Washington can work together where you have a Republican and Democrat [Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA)] who have to accept something in the middle and we get something that’s much better than what we have right now.”

Paul also talked about his current proposal to audit the Federal Reserve, stating that the current audit is “not an audit at all.”

“We had the auditor come before Congress a year and a half ago and they asked her, ‘What did the Fed buy with $4 trillion when they bought $4 trillion worth of assets?’ The auditor has no idea,” he said.

When asked about a Washington Post story “on the sort of self-appointed board of colleagues and relatives that were part of your ophthalmology group in Kentucky,” Paul responded firmly.

“Once again, you’re mischaracterizing and confusing the whole situation. The Board of Ophthalmology decided many years ago that they would not certify older doctors, only younger doctors. I led a protest of several hundred ophthalmologists who said that if we’re going to have re-certification, everyone should re-certify regardless of age. So, you’ve taken something and you’ve twisted it… and you have taken an interview and you’ve made an interview into something where we got no useful information because you were argumentative and you started out with so many presuppositions that were incorrect. The fight I had for many years for over a decade was that re-certification in the Board of Ophthalmology, something I passed initially, should be done for all. Everything else is a sideline to try to criticize me for how it was incorporated or unincorporated. All petty sort of criticisms by political opponents. I did something to make it fair to say that all ophthalmologists, particularly the older ones, I would think the older you are, and the farther away you are from your training, the more it would be necessary to– that you would be re-certified. So, that’s what it was about, it was about fairness and not grandfathering older ophthalmologists in.”

Regarding the 2016 presidential race, Paul said, “We’re thinking about it, and we’re looking around the United States and seeing if the message resonates. Part of the problem is, is that you end up having interviews like this where the interview’s so slanted and full of distortions that you don’t get useful information. I think this is what’s bad about TV sometimes. So, frankly I think if we do this again, you need to try to start out with a little more objectivity going into the interview.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter: @IanHanchett