The Doctor Who Made Kentucky Sicker

Rand Paul’s Pandemic of Bullshit

WHITE ROSE | AUGUST 1, 2026

Rand Paul enjoys introducing himself as “Doctor” whenever the title gives his political opinions the faint aroma of medical authority. The public should read the fine print.

Paul is an ophthalmologist, not an epidemiologist, virologist, immunologist, pulmonologist, infectious disease specialist, or public health physician. He was trained to treat diseases of the eye. During COVID, however, he repeatedly presented himself as though examining corneas had somehow qualified him to overrule the accumulated expertise of the world’s infectious disease community.

Even his professional credentials contain a characteristically Rand Paul footnote. After allowing his certification from the recognized American Board of Ophthalmology to expire, Paul relied upon certification from the National Board of Ophthalmology, an organization he created himself. Its officers included his wife and father-in-law. It was not recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties, and the experiment eventually collapsed. Rand Paul did not merely distrust the establishment. He built his own establishment and placed himself at the top of it.

That episode tells us quite a bit about the man. When a legitimate institution refuses to validate Rand Paul on his preferred terms, his instinct is not self-examination. His instinct is to declare the institution corrupt, create an alternative authority, and certify himself correct.

COVID gave him a national stage for the same performance.

Paul opposed mask requirements on public transportation. He pushed to overturn vaccination, testing, and masking requirements for Senate pages. He described school masking as “mask theater” and publicly claimed that, for healthy young people, vaccine risks could exceed the risks of COVID. He repeatedly framed basic public health precautions as government fearmongering rather than imperfect attempts to reduce infection, hospitalization, disability, and death.

Some of his individual observations contained slivers of truth. Cloth masks were less effective than well-fitted respirators. Previous infection did provide some immunity. Young people generally faced lower risks than the elderly. Public health officials sometimes communicated poorly and changed recommendations as evidence developed.

Paul’s trick was to extract each uncertainty from its context and turn it into an argument against collective action. A less effective mask became a useless mask. Lower risk became no meaningful risk. Evolving scientific guidance became evidence of dishonesty. A vaccine that did not prevent every infection became a failed vaccine.

That is not scientific skepticism. Scientific skepticism asks whether the evidence is strong enough and adjusts its conclusions when better evidence arrives. Paul’s version begins with an ideological conclusion, cherry-picks whatever evidence appears useful, and treats every correction as proof of conspiracy.

Kentucky provides an uncomfortable setting for Paul’s victory lap.

The state’s early pandemic record was not uniformly disastrous. Governor Andy Beshear declared an emergency on March 6, 2020, instituted restrictions, expanded testing, issued county-level warnings, and held regular public briefings. By October 2021, Kentucky’s cumulative COVID death rate remained close to the national average, although its infection rate was already about 17 percent higher.

The later picture became considerably uglier.

CDC mortality data published in 2026 show Kentucky with an age-adjusted COVID death rate of 11.1 per 100,000 for the reported year, compared with 7.2 in Michigan, 6.3 in California and Wisconsin, 6.9 in New York, and 5.7 in Colorado and Utah. Among the states listed, only West Virginia’s rate was slightly higher at 11.2. Kentucky’s rate was roughly 50 percent higher than Michigan’s and nearly double Colorado’s.

Those deaths cannot honestly be placed on the shoulders of one senator. Kentucky entered the pandemic with serious disadvantages, including chronic illness, poverty, rural hospital limitations, smoking, obesity, and unequal access to care. Beshear, not Paul, directed the state government’s response. Personal behavior, vaccination levels, new variants, federal policy, local politics, and existing health conditions all affected the result.

Paul nevertheless helped shape the environment in which Kentuckians made life-or-death decisions. He supplied respectable-sounding language to people who wanted to believe that masks were oppression, vaccination was more dangerous than disease, and epidemiologists were merely bureaucrats protecting their power. He converted public health into another tribal loyalty test.

That matters. A senator cannot spend years undermining preventive medicine and then wash his hands when the people he represents suffer unusually high mortality. He cannot market suspicion as courage, call resistance “freedom,” and pretend the resulting body count belongs entirely to someone else.

Paul now presents himself as the great inquisitor of the pandemic, particularly when Anthony Fauci is seated beneath the television lights. Fauci is not beyond criticism. No public official should be. Decisions involving school closures, research funding, masking guidance, vaccine communication, and the origins of the virus deserve serious examination.

Paul is not conducting serious examination.

He is staging a prosecution in search of a crime. His hearings have become exercises in insinuation, interruption, semantic traps, and made-for-social-media outrage. The goal is rarely to discover what happened or improve the next pandemic response. The goal is to place Rand Paul in the heroic role of the lone doctor exposing the corrupt medical empire.

The costume does not fit.

Fauci spent a career studying infectious disease. Paul spent the pandemic studying how infectious disease could be converted into political content.

The most revealing question is therefore not whether Fauci was always right. He was not. The question is whether Rand Paul made the public more capable of understanding COVID, evaluating risk, and protecting vulnerable neighbors.

He did not.

He made people angrier. He made them more suspicious. He made scientific uncertainty sound like fraud and basic precautions sound like tyranny. He treated every microphone as an examining room, every disagreement as malpractice, and every dead Kentuckian as somebody else’s responsibility.

Rand Paul may be qualified to examine Kentucky’s eyes.

Its COVID record suggests he should stop pretending he can see the whole patient.

#WhiteRose #RandPaul #Kentucky #COVID19 #PublicHealth #MedicalMisinformation #PandemicPolitics #Fauci #Accountabilit

 

SENATOR RAND PAUL, AND EVERY SINGLE SENATOR IN THE DR. ANTHONY FAUCI HEARING, HAVE ALL BEEN VACCINATED, WITHOUT ONE SINGLE EXCEPTION, AND SO WERE ALL THEIR CHILDREN AND THEIR GRANDCHILDREN... WITHOUT EXCEPTION!  

EVERY.    SINGLE.    ONE. 

Here's what MAGA needs you to forget while they re-litigate 2020: Trump wasn't a bystander to the response they hate.

He was directing it — loudly.

"Fauci is a disaster. If I listened to him, we'd have 500,000 deaths."
"People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots."

That's Trump in October 2020, on a campaign call reporters were allowed to hear.

Six months earlier, he'd retweeted "Time to # FireFauci."

So the record shows Trump overruling, undermining, and attacking his own top infectious disease doctor in real time — and his party spending the five years since prosecuting the doctor for the results.

Same logic on the election.

The 2020 vote was administered while Trump ran the DOJ, the DHS, and the FBI. If it was stolen, it was stolen from the man in charge of stopping exactly that — by agencies he appointed.

Every 2020 grievance is a confession.

They're not investigating a failure.
They're investigating their own boss.
And they're praying you won't notice.
 

8/31/2026

Donald Trump's aides "rushed the press" out of the Oval Office after one of his speeches sparked fears that "something was wrong", it's been claimed. The President addressed reporters on multiple topics at the White House yesterday (July 30), discussing matters including the conflict in Iran, his recent sit-down with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and his desire to "end the war" in Ukraine.

However, the briefing took an unusual direction when Trump, whose marriage to Melania is at its lowest point due to a 'disturbing' reason, shifted focus to domestic matters. He went off on a tangent about his administration "changing all the grass in all the parks" before making the peculiar comparison that grass is like "human beings".

It led to what one observer characterized as a hasty effort to remove attendees from the scene. It comes after Karoline Leavitt accidentally humiliated Trump as critics asked about his 'diaper'.

• Melania Trump's aide shares what she was doing as she snubbed Lindsey Graham's funeral

• Reflecting Pool track marks revealed in new aerial shots after Trump's motorcade error

Political commentator David Pakman explained how the address grew increasingly perplexing in what he termed a "strange chapter in the novel that is this insane presidency". He stated: "They suddenly realised something was wrong with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, and they rushed the press out."

US-POLITICS-TRUMP © Getty

During his YouTube program, The David Pakman Show, he later commented: "As it became clear to the aides in the room that Donald Trump was starting to decompensate, and he simply couldn't do it anymore, the bevvy of aides who mostly have the same look, I don't know if like, am I not supposed to notice that the aides have a very similar look? They just rush reporters out of the room."

He noted they seemed to be attempting to "very quickly" move people the "hell out of there". In the footage, Trump abruptly thanked those present, indicating the meeting's conclusion, before two aides positioned themselves directly before the cameras.

As the shot zoomed out, two female staff members made urgent gestures with their arms, directing the press to exit. While reporters hastily left, Trump and his colleagues remained visible in the background, maintaining polite smiles.

Earlier in the meeting, Trump stated: "Grass is like human beings. Grass is a life also. And we're changing. We're raking, cleaning and changing all of the parks. We don't have people."

President Trump Makes Announcement With Secretary Of Transportation Sean Duffy In The Oval Office © Getty

He continued: "We don't have the tents anymore. We don't have all the barbed wire up. We don't have the wire up."

Trump then pivoted to border security, windmills and his proposals to overhaul Dulles Airport in Virginia. For David, this final subject proved especially perplexing, describing it as a "bizarre and demented word salad".

Trump stated: "Within a few years, it will be rated the best airport in the country. So it's going to be so efficient. Right now, it's totally inefficient between the trams and the Star Wars thing that they go up.

"The Star Wars and elevated buses and nobody knows what's going on. It's a real mess."

His nod to George Lucas's sci-fi classic Star Wars seems directed at the shuttle transport operating at Dulles. Dubbed "people movers" these vehicles have reportedly drawn the POTUS's ire and been likened to vehicles from the iconic franchise.

It comes after disrespectful Trump was slammed for a 'disgusting' act during Lindsey Graham's funeral.

 

 Last week Republicans took the final steps toward destroying what's left of U.S. media consolidation laws. It didn't warrant much attention by the press; in part because corporate consolidation has been deadly for U.S. journalism already.

Republicans and their media arm(s) have two unsubtle goals: massive consolidation among right wing local broadcast companies, and the befuddlement of the U.S. electorate by way of propaganda pretending to be useful local TV news.

The Trump administration has been taking specific aim at the National Television Ownership Rule, which is supposed to prevent a single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the U.S.

They're doing this to the benefit of Nexstar Media Group and Tegna, who combined own more than 330 local TV news stations. Both companies have a history of kissing Donald Trump's ass, and are pursuing a $6.2 billion merger giving the new, bigger company dominion over more than half of U.S. households.

Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has been telling right wing propaganda websites this is all necessary to "restore balance" in media. Carr's announcement falsely claims he's looking to restore trust in media...by ensuring local broadcast TV news is dominated by a small handful of Trump-friendly broadcasters.

Carr's fellow Democratic FCC Commissioner, Anna Gomez, was quick to point out that this is technically theft of purportedly publicly-owned airwaves. And because Congressional law demands the FCC enforce media consolidation limits, the whole thing is brazenly illegal:

“This unlawful effort to hand control of the public airwaves to billionaire buddies of this administration will destroy local newsrooms, silence community reporting, and drive-up costs for the American families who depend on local stations for news and emergency alerts. A free and diverse media landscape depends on real limits on how much of the public airwaves any one company can control, and this FCC is now poised to allow local broadcasters to sell those airwaves off to the highest bidder."

 

Remember laws? Adorable.

Despite the 39% cap, TV broadcast news was already in trouble, thanks to the steady erosion of media ownership limits first mandated by Congress in 1941, and steadily eroded by corporate power and corruption ever since.

The sector is dominated by a handful of companies all owned by affluent right wing old white men, and their local "TV news" output consists of sloppy infotainment and the sort of right wing propaganda that pummels local communities with crime, homelessness, and drug abuse fear mongering.

Sinclair Broadcasting, for example, routinely airs anything from white-supremacy-friendly garbage to dangerous right wing health disinformation. When the company took over Seattle's ABC affiliate KOMO in 2018, the station's employees, disgusted by "must run" propaganda segments, began running for the exits.

Nexstar's local broadcast affiliates – and it's terrible Newsnation cable TV channel – routinely find themselves under fire for for the same behavior. Both Nexstar and Sinclair recently proved themselves very eager to help Trump demolish the First Amendment and censor comedians critical of the Presidency.

A fair assumption is that once Nexstar is allowed to buy Tegna, they'll move on to merge with Sinclair Broadcasting, putting the near-entirety of local broadcast TV under the control of right wing zealots loyal to Trumpism (or whatever unholy authoritarian iterations are belched forth in the decades to come).

Academics have been warning about this for decades, but this eight-year-old viral Deadspin video was arguably the most effective in demonstrating how local U.S. broadcast "news" has become a homogenized, bobble-headed infotainment and agitprop sewer where useful local journalism goes to die:

click to watch on YouTube

Deadspin has, I should point out, long-since been acquired and run into the ground by private equity.

Less real local journalism creates local news deserts, where there's less attention paid to local corruption or abuses by consolidated corporate power. In 2019, I spoke to researchers documenting how the supplanting of local journalism with right wing propaganda measurably swings election outcomes.

I often see a prevailing sentiment that this sort of thing doesn't matter because "nobody watches regular TV anymore," but that's simply not true. 65% to 70% of U.S. adults (roughly 170–180 million people) still at least occasionally watch local TV broadcasts via cable, antenna, satellite, or streaming.

That's 180 million households consuming lazy right wing propaganda in a country endlessly confused as to why such a large segment of the electorate routinely votes against their best self interests. The output of these local broadcasts is also tethered to national media and internet news sources, allowing the right wing to manufacture entire bogus news and outrage discourse cycles at will.

And this is just local news.

We're not even talking about Fox News, arguably the most successful modern media propaganda machine ever constructed. Or Twitter, which is now Elon Musk's personal right wing propaganda website. Or TikTok, which is now co-owned by Trump's billionaire ally Larry Ellison, who is also gobbling up networks like CBS and CNN with the unsubtle goal of replacing what was left of soggy corporate journalism with something arguably worse.

Then of course you have Breitbart, Dally Caller, The Daily Wire, the New York Post and the endless other right wing propaganda ops pretending to do useful journalism. And who can ignore the way U.S. oligarchs are buying papers like the Baltimore Sun, Washington Post, and LA Times to pummel us with oligarch-friendly gibberish.

With scattered exception, Democrats have been a feckless disaster when it comes to media policy and reform. Not only have they not had a cogent media reform plan anytime in the last quarter-century, establishment dems can't even effectively communicate the fact that there's an information war going on.

A war in which journalism, education, science, and informed consensus are losing, badly. Most Democrats can be found paying empty lip service to journalism before rubber-stamping the next terrible merger, and traditionally have treated competent media regulation as a droll and unnecessary afterthought.

Assuming we can unfasten Trump's fangs from the neck of democracy, media reform is going to be absolutely essential if the country doesn't want to enjoy repeated, ongoing bouts with corporatocracy and fascism, culminating in the country splintering into a broken coagulation of bickering nation states.

Such reform has to center around restoring media consolidation limits, imposing media ownership diversity requirements, rebuilding our demolished public broadcasting systems, embracing meaningful antitrust reform, and establishing tougher new media literacy standards (Finland starts teaching children to spot propaganda and unreliable narrators as early as three-years-old).

A cornerstone of modern right wing power is propaganda, and if we can't muster a coherent response to right wing information warfare, we're going to be stuck under the boot heel of the dumbest, greediest motherfuckers imaginable, indefinitely.