RE: Rand Paul may not have said it, but it is an idea I have seen expressed. I do read and comment on other forums.
The title of this thread is about Rand Paul, himself a doctor. He is not responsible for what other people might say and think.
I agree, he is not responsible for what others say.
However, he is doing nothing to stem the flow of antivax/antiscience conspiracies and rhetoric. Someone with his educational background--he holds an MD degree and specialized in ophthalmology) should know better. On the contrary, he keeps adding fuel to the conspiracy fire. I suspect that he has put his medical background aside in order to help spread misinformation because of political calculations. Put simply, he has calculated that the way to win conservatives to his side is by fostering the conspiracy theories that are circulating in conservative media and forums.
In general, the targeting of conservatives with misinformation has been a very negative development of the pandemic. Not only does it fill people's heads with misinformation that can injure or kill them, it helps to cement the idea that conservatives are a bunch of crackpots. Those spreading the misinformation have very successfully tied us to it in the minds of the general population. For example, run-of-the-mill liberals not only blame Trump for spreading Covid misinformation, but for creating the misinformation. Never mind that Trump does not have the scientific background to even begin to create antivax/antiscience rhetoric. The fact that he and conservatives in general are blamed for the rise of Covid misinformation is, I'm afraid, deeply damaging to the conservative movement.
Early on in the pandemic, I saw FR being used as a dumping ground for misinformation. I suspect that Russian troll farms were, in fact, using FR as a conduit to spread misinformation among conservatives. I tried to fight it. I tried to inform people about the science. One poster in particular would post long screeds daily about how Covid is "just a flu" and we shouldn't be worried about it, but whenever I would rebut his claims, he never replied. I suspect that he was a Russian troll. I stopped fighting the misinformation around April or May 2020, when I realized that people were so convinced by it that they would rather hold on to it than see Trump be reelected. Unfortunately, the election result turned out the way I thought it would.
I've returned to take up the fight against misinformation again because I'm afraid that conservatism will not have a future as long as we can be painted as antiscience antivax kooks. I do not want to live in the socialist dictatorship that has, by all evidence, just about taken over. In just two years of Biden, we have lost too much.