Fake Board
Prior to his political career, Rand Paul has an interesting history. He was an ophthalmologist who took issue with the American Board of Ophthalmology requiring recertification every ten years. That’s the same recertification cycle as most certification boards. I have to recertify every five years.
Instead, he acted like a toddler and decided to start his own board, the National Board of Ophthalmologists (NBO), in 1999, claiming that the ten-year requirement was a “hypocritical power play that I despise and have always fought against.” The NBO was never a member of the American Board of Medical Specialties. The NBO was dissolved in 2011, but he claimed to be board-certified until 2013.
The even bigger irony is that Paul, his wife, and his father-in-law were listed as being in charge of the NBO, which is a clear case of nepotism. Legitimate medical boards avoid this to prevent conflicts of interest. They also have oversight from outside agencies, which the NBO did not. It’s interesting that in his public life he never talks about nepotism, because he knows this would come back and bite him.
His father-in-law, Hilton Ashby, was listed as secretary of the board. When asked about it, he stated “‘I can’t tell you what the organization does.’ Informed that he was listed as the group’s secretary, Ashby said: ‘I was at one time involved as a secretary on something. But I don’t know whether it was about that specifically or not.'”
I’ve been the secretary of a non-profit board and can guarantee that I knew everything that the organization did. Ashby’s response is very suggestive that the board was nothing but something similar to a diploma mill. So much for Paul having any integrity. It’s peak hypocrisy that he complains about DEI when having a history of nepotism and lining his own pockets.
Complaints with Some Legitimacy
In fairness, Paul does make some fair complaints about transparency and oversight, but he sems to focus these more against departments that he does not like or that are run by people that are not politically aligned. One complaint is around the timely release of documents from NIH/NIAID at the height of the pandemic. He seems to forget that scientists in these institutions were either really busy at the time or working remotely, where they may not have had ready access to files. This is a function of bureaucracy under unusual conditions.
He also complains about NIH grant funding and oversight. He seems to completely forget that this is one of the largest biomedical research institutes in the world. I would argue that most people there are working on the common good and may rush through oversight in order to keep science moving forward. Most scientists and researchers want to do those activities, not administration and bueraucratic ones.
There is ongoing debate around the ethics of gain-of-function research and there are good arguments on both sides of this. I will mention that I’ve done a lot of research related to biological warfare and terrorism. Part of a mitigation and response strategy is to identify vulnerabilities as a means to develop countermeasures. That seems to be completely lost in his narrow view.
Paul’s Lies
Paul claims that Fauci “funded gain‑of‑function research” in Wuhan through EcoHealth. Many governmental and independent organizations have investigated his claim and found no evidence to support it.
He claims that Fauci “lied to Congress” about gain-of-function, but there is no evidence to support that either. It’s also important to note that “gain-of-function” has different definitions in different contexts in the same way that “safe and effective” does. These are differences between scientific, legal, and regulatory.
He makes the above arguments that NIH-funded research is what caused the pandemic. There is no evidence to support this. Further, there is far more evidence for natural origin.
It’s also worth noting that the federal government imposed a pause on certain gain‑of‑function experiments from 2014 to 2017, and later implemented the P3CO framework which is a formal review system designed to evaluate and mitigate risks in enhanced pathogen research. Paul rarely acknowledges this regulatory history, which directly contradicts his claims that NIH operated without oversight
The Takeaway
Rand Paul can disagree on policy, but not on facts. I would argue that he is grandstanding for political clout using Fauci as a scapegoat for his own personal gain. He’s a hypocrite based on his previous statement about a certification board being a “hypocritical power play that I despise and have always fought against.”
