Former congressman and presidential GOP contender Ron Paul last week decried public trust in Dr. Anthony Fauci, suggesting the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director should be removed from the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force.

Referring to Fauci as a “fraud,” Paul said on his web show, the “Ron Paul Liberty Report,” that Fauci was no different from other Washington experts and bureaucrats seeking to profit politically from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and should be fired by President Donald Trump immediately.

If the president failed to take action, the Texas Republican and libertarian suggested, the people would have to band together and defy Fauci’s mandates instead.

“Of course, a significant move would be to get rid of Fauci, who is giving us all this information,” Paul, himself a physician and former Air Force flight surgeon, told his co-host Daniel McAdams.

“That’s not likely to happen, but I think the type of firing that may be on your mind — and that is, he should be fired. But if you don’t do it in the literal sense, the people have to fire him.”

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“They have to fire him by saying, ‘He’s a fraud! He doesn’t give us any good information,'” Paul added.

Fauci Should Be Fired If Not By Trump, Then By The American People Watch the whole show: https://t.co/R0BxsKHghJ pic.twitter.com/s66hlzgPrK — Ron Paul (@RonPaul) April 9, 2020

Paul went on to suggest that Fauci’s frequently overstated estimates and sensational rhetoric regarding governmental pandemic response measures, such as “social distancing,” seemed to be informed primarily by “authoritarianism.”

Amid a presumed peak of the outbreak in the United States, according to The Hill, Fauci admitted on Wednesday that initial estimates of 100,000 to 240,000 — potentially even 1 million — U.S. coronavirus deaths by August were likely wildly overblown, with researchers behind the nation’s most popular statistical models beginning to greatly reduce their projections.

The University of Washington’s widely cited IMHE model was just one example, seeing projected death totals fall by roughly 35 percent to 60,415 total deaths in the past week, National Review reported.

Still, Fauci and other leading national experts have continued to advocate for extraordinary mitigation measures going forward, painting a dreary picture of American life for the next year or more.

According to KRON, Fauci told reporters Tuesday at a White House news briefing that a total return to normalcy “might not ever happen,” though he hoped de facto house arrest for the majority of the American population would come to an end when a cure for COVID-19 or vaccine for the coronavirus was found.

“When we get back to normal, we will go back to the point where we can function as a society,” Fauci said, responding to a question from ABC’s Jonathan Karl, according to KRON. “But you’re absolutely right. If you want to get back to pre-coronavirus, that might not ever happen in the sense that the threat is there.”

“I believe that with the therapies that will be coming online, and the fact that I feel confident that over a period of time we will get a good vaccine, that we will never have to get back to where we are right now,” he added.

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Some therapies that seem to be showing signs of success in small-scale trials worldwide — things like chloroquine combined with azithromycin — have failed to entirely win Fauci’s support. (However, Fauci has said he himself would have no problem prescribing chloroquine for a patient suffering from COVIC-19 under the right circumstances.)

Meanwhile, Fauci has been emphatic about his support for social distancing with no defined end date, despite the evidence for such measures coming only from this wildly unscientific experiment we now find ourselves in.

He has also voiced tentative support for preventing a return to the workplace for those without a federally mandated certificate of immunity, and even suggested Tuesday that he does not believe we “should ever shake hands ever again.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci has contributed a great deal to his country. But he can no longer be one of the primary voices in this crisis, especially not after his assertion that the economic effects & devastation are merely inconvenient. https://t.co/KbXQ2Myrna @RepKenBuck — Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) April 11, 2020

Big. Dr. Fauci: “If you want to get to pre-coronavirus, that might not ever happen.” He adds we will get back eventually to a “functioning” society without the severe social distancing we have right now. — Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) April 6, 2020

“They didn’t save us from ourselves,” Paul said. “And this plan to give [government] total control of everybody, the plan that they have, is when things are getting back to normal, yes, people can return to their work and do things and go to the golf course, if you get a stamp of approval.

“Your liberties are there if you get the proper stamp from the government and say, ‘well, you’re free of spreading any disease.’ But as this one goes away, they’ll come up with another one. It’s an excuse to have total control over the people,” he said.

Paul, however, is not the first, and hopefully will not be the last, to point out the clear government overreach being carried out amid this emergency.

As Republican Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona and Ken Buck of Colorado pointed out in a recent Washington Examiner opinion piece, public life as we know it has been put on indefinite hold, in part on Fauci’s advice. Yet, the man has referred to the aforementioned policies and their impact on the American people as merely “inconvenient.”

People are losing their jobs and the economy is in free-fall.

Under threat of government action, many Americans were restricted from attending public church services on Easter Sunday, sparking court battles.

Heck, a Colorado father was detained and handcuffed last week for playing ball with his 6-year-old daughter in an empty — and open — public park.

Anyone starting to think maybe we’ve gone a bit overboard?

Of course, none of that is to say the coronavirus pandemic should not be taken seriously. It absolutely should.

However, the government needs a better solution than unconstitutional restrictions of liberty until further notice.

And if the “experts” cannot get on board with that, perhaps their jobs should be next on the chopping block. Only sounds fair considering their advice is putting American jobs in the same uncertain place.

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