> “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Fauci told the Times. “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.”
It sure sounds like he was intentionally feeding us false hope.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/531611-fauci-herd-immu...
The parent comment asked "who sold these ideas [that vaccines prevent transmission] to the general public?" From the quote I posted, it certainly seems like Fauci did.
Is there something I'm missing here?
The number 50 was mentioned in passing, but it doesn't sound like he was predicting any specific efficacy number, only that it would not be as high as the rosy 90%+ that was shown by some data. To me, parsing these words is a little nit-picky, since we are talking about a 2 year period during which multiple new and unexpected strains have become dominant, and vast amounts of new clinical data have been published.
And it's true that the quotes come from early on in the pandemic.
However, the claim that it was randos on Twitter and not the experts - at any time - who purveyed the idea that the Covid vaccines would significantly prevent transmission - unlike flu vaccines - is contradicted by the quote from Fauci that I posted in response to the question: "who sold these ideas to the public?"
That was something that literally nobody expected, not even epidemiologists or virologists. Goodbye herd immunity argument entirely. Everyone catches SARS-CoV-2 sooner or later.
Fauci was prepping everyone for vaccines with a 50% VE against infection back in late 2020 before the results of the phase 3 trials were produced.
https://nypost.com/2020/08/07/fauci-says-covid-19-vaccine-ma...
> “The chances of it being 98 percent effective is not great,” Fauci, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said at a Q&A with the Brown University School of Public Health in Rhode Island, according to CNBC.
> Instead, Fauci said, scientists are hoping for a vaccine that is 75 percent effective — but even a 50 or 60 percent success rate would be considered a win.
At the same time though we're still at >90% VE against severe disease and hospitalization through the persistence of T-cell immunity, but that just doesn't protect against initial infection since T-cells take a few days to get going in response to an infection. The vaccines can be largely credited with most of the "milder" Omicron wave keeping the infection-hospitalization-rate much lower.
So who exactly "sold" these ideas about the vaccines to the general public? Because it wasn't the leading public health expert not the pandemic.
How much did the public hear what it wanted to hear from media sources and self-appointed twitter experts?