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.