Sen. Rand Paul blasted the lockdown strategy across the U.S. being pushed by Dr. Anthony Fauci and numerous Democratic leaders, calling the closures a “big mistake” that are damaging the economy.

The lockdowns have done little to stem the spread of the virus, Paul said on the “Fox News Rundown” podcast on Wednesday, noting that states with lockdowns recently saw the same spikes as states with no lockdowns.

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“We’ve seen surges in coronaviruses in the midst of lockdown,” Paul said, according to Fox News. “New York had a lockdown and had 30,000 people die. New York had the worst death rate of any place in the world amid a lockdown, so perhaps a lockdown didn’t do any good and perhaps a lockdown killed our economy, but didn’t do anything to stem the tide of the virus. So I see nothing to be admired in New York’s lockdown.”

“I see a mountain of people who died, particularly in the nursing homes,” Paul said. “I don’t think the lockdown did them any good. I think it killed the economy, but didn’t do any good for trying to contain the virus.”

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Paul noted that the virus has hit the elderly and those in ill health hard, but has not hit younger, healthy people.

“We need to put it in context [that] under age 45 this disease [COVID-19] we’re looking at is less dangerous than the seasonal flu,” Paul said. “Above age 45, it’s more dangerous than the seasonal flu.”

“If you’re in your 80s and you’re in a nursing home, we need to do all kinds of things to try to protect you, but I don’t think that involves shutting down the economy,” he said. “I think that involves other precautions.”

Paul compared the situation to those on chemotherapy.

“We typically have among us tens of thousands of people who are on chemotherapy, but we don’t tell the whole country to wear masks because you might give a virus to people who are in chemotherapy.”

“What we do is people on chemotherapy try to be very cautious, to stay away from children with infectious diseases or others who might transmit it, but we don’t shut the entire economy down, even though there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people with depressed immune systems,” Paul said.