He lied about the required levels to reach herd immunity too. Ends justify the means I guess? But it’s hard to take him at face value about anything anymore.

“In the pandemic’s early days, Dr. Fauci tended to cite the same 60 to 70 percent estimate that most experts did. About a month ago, he began saying “70, 75 percent” in television interviews. And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said “75, 80, 85 percent” and “75 to 80-plus percent.”

In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.

Hard as it may be to hear, he said, he believes that it may take close to 90 percent immunity to bring the virus to a halt — almost as much as is needed to stop a measles outbreak.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...

These are not lies, these are changes in our understanding of viral epidemiology that we have seen happen throughout the course of the pandemic, concomitant with the introduction of increasingly more contagious strains. Science has a lot of uncertainty in it and we’ve seen a lot of hypotheses refuted in the past year: surface transmission and microdroplets (actually mostly aerosol), mask inefficacy (they do work! mostly when everyone wears them), and herd immunity (probably harder than we initially expected). These are all things that were just poorly understood and understudied pre-pandemic. Our understanding of them is still rapidly developing and changing now. I realize it’s hard for the general public to understand, but science doesn’t know everything and we need to be able to accept when our understanding of something changes in light of new evidence.

The guy literally said himself that they were lies. That's what "the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks" means.

The lengths people will go to, to defend this type of person, is amazing.

> These are not lies, these are changes in our understanding of viral epidemiology

Stop arguing with the guy, I'm not sure what his motives are, but whatever they may be, facts will not change his mind.

It's just reactance if you ask me, but I'm not a psychologist.

I encourage you to read through https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Wow, that boot tastes good

There were asserted as fact by professionals who are sophisticated enough to either know they aren't fact or to be held accountable for being wrong.

I thought this was simple math. The reproduction value R of the original type was estimated to be around 3 (one sick person infects on average three other persons). So to get this below 1, we need a vaccination rate of around 2/3 (1-1/R). The delta variant has a higher R of 6-8, so we may need as much as 90% of the population to be vaccinated. It's completely plausible and has nothing to do with lying.

The lying is that the numbers have been changing, by his own admission, based on what he thought the American public should hear. If it is such "simple math", and the number is 90%, then Fauci saying 70% when he knew that was wrong is lying.

The R0 changed: initial WHO estimates were (1.4, 2.4); now multiple studies have a mean of 5.08 [1]. Thus the simple math changed. 60% likely does grant herd immunity at an R0 of 2.5; it does not for delta.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/jtm/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jtm...

> Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.

Dr fauci himself admitted that he was giving bad numbers based on what he wanted the American public to hear.

This is the whole disconnect. The people like Fauci that we are supposed to blindly trust are clearly willing to deceive in order to satisfy their own goals. That's why people distrust him.

The Delta variant is sufficiently contagious that we can't achieve any real herd immunity through vaccination. It's still important to get vaccinated to protect yourself.

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

Those calculations of herd immunity threshold percentages were usually over simplified based on the assumption that immunity is a binary condition. But in reality while vaccinated people are less likely to suffer severe symptoms they can still get infected and spread the virus.

With early variants 60-70% may have very well been sufficient. As we get variants that can spread more easily that raises the bar on what we need for herd immunity. I don’t think a lot of people appreciate just how much worse Delta has been in this regard. Fingers crossed we don’t get an even worse variant.

But NYT article where the quote originated is from December 2020 (ie months before the Delta variant was officially named and more than half a year before it hit the US), so I don't think that is an explanation for why the number changed.

I think the most likely explanation is that public health officials believed that citing a 60-70 number would feel more achievable, and thus encourage people to continue masking/distancing until a vaccine was available. If they has said 85% in May 2020, maybe people would have thought it was hopeless and just opened up immediately.

Whether they judged correctly or not, I don't think it was a good idea to bend the truth because it erodes trust in institutions.

That may very well be. However, there's no need to wonder whether Fauci was being totally frank the entire time, because he has outright said that he knowingly gave a so-optimistic-its-a-lie estimate at first, in an effort to avoid intimidating people.

He said that at the time because COVID wasn't endemic all over the USA and he didn't want folks going out and hoarding all of the N95 masks which were needed at the time most critically for hospital workers.

Once the situation changed and everyone needed to wear a mask he said that folks should go out and buy masks (and after the supply gap was closed a bit).

Yeah he lied because he had to, and he lied later about herd immunity too. Whether it was good policy or not, I can’t assume anything he says is based on fact alone.

They weren't sure about airborne transmission from a-symptomatic people at the time. Delta variant has a higher r0 than alpha, so the herd immunity numbers change. Saying he's purposefully lying because the facts on the ground change is ridiculous.

> Saying he's purposefully lying because the facts on the ground change is ridiculous

Yeah, but it's fair to say he's purposefully lying because he told us he was purposefully lying.

https://www.axios.com/fauci-goalposts-herd-immunity-c83c7500...

Here's the direct quote:

> When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent 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 .... We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent."

...where is the false statement? Fauci gave one estimate, then gave another more conservative estimate in an attempt to encourage people to get the vaccine. At no point did he give a number out of the range supported by the available data.

Calling that "purposefully lying" is ridiculous. People who have to present a single number to summarize an entire body of scientific research for the general public always have to make a decision about how conservative of an estimate to give.

> People who have to present a single number to summarize an entire body of scientific research for the general public always have to make a decision about how conservative of an estimate to give

You expect those people to make their estimate based on the scientific research, not based on what he thinks the people are "ready to hear".

He literally said that the motivation for saying 80, 85 was the fact that a poll showing how many people had already been convinced to take it.

It's just a fact - he was selling the vaccine. I'm not alleging a conspiracy, or shady financial motives. I'm not saying the vaccine is bad, because I think it's amazing. But Fauci gave numerical estimates that he did not believe to be accurate, for PR reasons.

> Fauci gave numerical estimates that he did not believe to be accurate

That's not what I read in the quote.

Talk about making a mountain of a mole hill. There's a range of possible values that the science supports and he said a number in that range when asked what he thinks.

So it's a white lie, at most, because he was always accurate. He stayed within the "real range" of 70-90, but he varied based on what people could tolerate hearing.

If he said 70-90%, then people may only hear 90 and think no way we'll get there. Sounds reasonable. If people hear we'll never get herd immunity due to delta and the potential for new variants, will more people get it or will it eliminate a reason for some to get it?

How would you have given a point estimate that both accurately reflects the scientific confidence interval estimate and also serves as an aspirational target for public policy?

Keep in mind that if your estimate is too low many people will die or have significantly reduced life quality. And if your estimate is too high internet trolls will use that as fodder to discourage people from getting vaccinated.

> and also serves as an aspirational target for public policy

There we go. He was giving aspirational targets, not scientific evaluations.

Sounds like he had a good reason to stretch the truth, but the fact remains.

> Sounds like he had a good reason to stretch the truth, but the fact remains.

It's not a good reason - this kind of manipulation is exactly why people distrust governments and "science".

I was encouraging you to reflect on why you think this is lying, because you are really grasping at straws.

You have not established any point where he lied or stretched the truth. What you have established is your personal axe to grind against Fauci.

It's good to examine why you feel the need to grind this axe.

We know why Fauci is controversial. He is controversial because the president wanted to let people die because he felt that is the truth about the pandemic came out he would lose power. Fauci told the truth and as a result was villainized by political extremists.

This alone explains, I don't know, like 99.9% of sentiment about Fauci.

So when you spend a lot of effort trying to convince people in the internet that he lied about something, but you're unable to produce any evidence, the perception is that you have some other reason for wanting to believe he lied.

So again I encourage you to think through what the ideal response would have been. Instead of trying to find any tiny reason to criticize him, actually think through what the right thing to do was.

EDIT: To make it even more clear, by the article you quoted, 100% of the numbers he gave were within the confidence interval. That is what it means to give a "scientific evaluation" as you say.

In other words, by your own admission he never told an untruth or a partial truth. He quoted the low end of the confidence interval saying "we likely need at least this many people assuming the vaccines are this effective etc". His gut feeling was that the numbers were higher, but he didn't have the evidence to say that, so the message we "we need at least this many people."

Then as we learned more he revised the estimates up closer to where he thought they should be initially, but which he didn't have evidence for.

Since he was telling the truth 100% of the time, it's difficult to make a case that he was lying or that he is untrustworthy.

No, that is incorrect.

Then don't listen to him, listen to the international consensus of leading health experts. That's a good guideline anyway.

They just happen to say pretty much the same thing.

Folks weren't hoarding the masks, they were being bought and sent overseas, because the US didn't block exports, like for example China did.

Anyway, this whole hoarding issue can be elegantly side-stepped by not outsourcing mask production and stockpiling. I assume the US government was aware of the possibility of pandemics (likely flu), just like everyone else on the planet was.

You could also mobilize your military (or similar) to produce masks short-term. In fact, that is what Taiwan did when most of the WHO and the so-called first world countries were still refusing to admit that there was a pandemic.