Dr. Anthony Fauci tried on Sunday to clarify his recent admission that he gave Americans different information regarding COVID-19 vaccinations based on opinion polling.
The confession: Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease official, told The New York Times days earlier that as the public has warmed to the vaccinations, he has revised upward his estimates of the threshold for “herd immunity.”
- “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75%,” Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60% or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
- “We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90%. But, I’m not going to say 90%.”
- Fauci said he doubted so many Americans would voluntarily receive a vaccine, and he didn’t want to be discouraging.
As Times health reporter Donald McNeil Jr. put it in the Thursday report: “Dr. Fauci acknowledged [to me] that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts.”
- Early in the pandemic, Fauci estimated that 60 to 70% of Americans having immunity would be enough to protect the entire U.S. population from infection, McNeil noted.
- “About a month ago, [however, Fauci] began saying ’70, 75%’ in television interviews. And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said ’75, 80, 85%’ and ’75 to 80-plus%.'”
Other prominent epidemiologists told McNeil that the early estimates by Fauci, and most other experts, were in fact probably too low, and the virus is becoming more transmissible, so it will take greater herd immunity to stop it.
The walk-back: CNN’s “State of the Union” host Dana Bash on Sunday morning asked Fauci directly: “Why weren’t you straight with the American people about this to begin with?”
- Fauci acknowledged he had raised his “guesstimate” of the herd immunity threshold over time, but said he had relied on the best available information to come up with “a range” and that “nobody really knows for sure.”
- “It was really based on calculations and pure extrapolations from measles,” he said, referring to the highly infectious disease that has been largely eradicated by a global vaccination campaign.
When Bash pressed Fauci on whether he had tailored his public messaging according to “polling and what people could accept,” he equivocated.
- “No, I mean it’s a bit of that,” he said. “I want to encourage the people of the United States and globally to get vaccinated because as many as we possibly get vaccinated, we’ll get closer to herd immunity.”
The reaction: Conservative commentators, already suspicious that Fauci and liberal-medical officialdom in general play politics with science, threw up their hands in disgust.
- Writer Andrew Sullivan tweeted on Thursday of Fauci, “I no longer trust him. He will lie to us ‘for our own good.'”
Sen. Marco Rubio, a Texas Republican, said on Twitter on Sunday that Fauci “has been distorting the level of vaccination needed for herd immunity” because he and many others in “elite bubbles” believe the American public doesn’t know ‘what’s good for them’ so they need to be tricked into ‘doing the right thing.'”
- Rubio also alleged, “Fauci lied about masks in March.”
During a June Senate hearing, Fauci said he had no regrets that in March he advised the public against wearing face masks based not on medical evidence, but rather because he wanted to save the protective equipment for medical workers.
- Fauci — along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he is a senior official — in April reversed course and began urging widespread mask-wearing.
- On CNN in May, Fauci expressed support for a national mask mandate, which he had previously rejected, saying, “I think that would be a great idea to have everybody do it uniformly.”
According to World Health Organization guidelines for communicating about the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders should acknowledge uncertainty, provide transparency about decision-making and admit mistakes — or risk losing the public’s trust.
- “There are limits,” the WHO says, “but the goal is to aim for total candor.”
- The WHO also switched in April from opposing to supporting government encouragement or requirement of public mask-wearing.
