Fauci Was Wrong Again
The human embodiment of Science™ proves yet again that he has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about
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You have to respect Fauci’s commitment.
He never tires of being hopelessly, consistently, incredibly incorrect about nearly every possible COVID policy.
His actions as the head of the U.S. COVID response have been rife with failure, authoritarianism, zero understanding of human nature, indescribable egoism and maniacal self-importance, and disastrous inaccuracies that have influenced local jurisdictions and corporations into mandating horrific, unacceptable policies.
But he seemingly relishes his role as the literal human embodiment of science; making declarative statements that are later proven to be wildly incorrect.
His latest Decree of Science was regarding booster shots — an already complicated and essentially unstudied addition to the 95% effective vaccination series.
Based mostly on antibody levels, booster shots theoretically should “top up” waning immunity among fully vaccinated individuals against severe illness and death.
But that’s not all Fauci claimed they’d do. I’ll let The Atlantic explain what Fauci said to expect from booster shots:
“Boosters Are for Keeping People Healthy, Not Alive”
Was Fauci right? Let’s find out!
Fauci, Guessing & Incompetence
To start, we need to go through some of the claims that Fauci made in the article because no one is better at explaining his own incompetence than Fauci himself:
Anthony Fauci told my colleague Ed Yong that he still believes third doses of the mRNA vaccines are crucial, suggesting once again that they will eventually be part of a standard regimen.
“Third doses of the mRNA vaccines are crucial, suggesting once again that they will eventually be part of a standard regimen.”
Keep that in mind, and remember Fauci’s statements on the initial results of two dose vaccinations:
The next section though, is where the incompetence and ignorance really starts to unfold:
First: What, exactly, is the point of offering third shots? Skeptics of large-scale boosting argue that the COVID-19 vaccines were designed to prevent severe hospitalization and death, while third shots seem more likely to offer (temporary) protection against infection and mild disease. In their view, boosting wouldn’t offer any meaningful gains. “I reject that,” Fauci, who serves as Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said at The Atlantic Festival today. “I think we should be preventing people from getting sick from COVID even if they don’t wind up in the hospital.”
Emphasis added.
“We should be preventing people from getting sick from COVID even if they don’t wind up in the hospital.”
This quote is illuminating for several reasons, the first of which is that we’ve heard repeatedly as the vaccines have failed to prevent infection or transmission that they were never meant to prevent infection or transmission, only severe illness.
So what is Fauci’s point here? Because it can’t be both. You can’t say that the vaccines don’t work to prevent infection because they were never supposed to, and then turn around and say that another dose of the exact same vaccine will prevent infections.
What’s the definition of insanity after all?
The second takeaway from his quote is the absurdity of attempting to prevent people from getting sick.
Throughout history, humanity has gotten sick. Today, people are getting sick. Tomorrow they will get sick. Literally forever, people will get sick. Trying to prevent sickness is not only impossible, it is one of the more idiotic suggestions made by anyone during the COVID pandemic.
Why are you worried about people having a cold? There are multiple circulating coronaviruses which cause colds, and will always cause colds. It’s an accepted part of life, because it is an inevitable part of life.
Fauci’s statement that he wants to prevent people from getting sick with COVID presents a fundamental misapprehension of illness, what the vaccines can do and not do, and seems to bely a lack of confidence in the shots. In short, it’s a disqualifying statement, one of many he’s made that should have resulted in his dismissal.
If the media had any semblance of intellectual honesty, it would have immediately questioned the absurdity of attempting to prevent humanity from getting sick. But of course, the media has done their best to ignore the obvious reality that everyone will get COVID.
This reality was obvious as far back as 2020, but world leading experts like Professor Francois Balloux pointed it out in July 2021:
Fauci’s comments were made two months later. How did he not get this? How did no one talking to him get this?
One might question whether he meant that booster shots wouldn’t prevent infection, but would lesson symptomatic illness. But why would he expect that would be the case as opposed to a full two dose vaccination series? It’s not as if there was a new randomized controlled trial suggesting booster shots were more likely to eliminate the risk of symptoms, it’s just a complete guess based on antibodies.
So even in the most charitable interpretation (which to me is not the accurate one), Fauci is just guessing that the booster doses would prevent symptoms more effectively than the original two dose vaccination series.
Or maybe he was concerned with long COVID, which is almost certainly psychosomatic:
The results “suggest that physical symptoms persisting 10 to 12 months after the COVID-19 pandemic first wave may be associated more with the belief in having experienced COVID-19 infection than with actually being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” the authors wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine.
There is no interpretation that makes Fauci’s comments look remotely competent, justifiable or based on scientific evidence. The best case scenario is that it was a complete guess. The worst case is that he believes that another dose of the same vaccines that were never “supposed” to prevent infection will work to…prevent infection.
Oh but don’t worry, based on literally nothing, he’s already laying the ground work for additional shots:
Fauci has previously suggested that third shots could become common practice, and today took an even stronger tack: “It is likely, for a real complete regimen, that you would need at least a third dose.”
The Data
So at this point, we’ve established that Fauci is some combination of incompetent, ignorant and willfully deceptive.
First, he claimed the vaccines were 100% effective at preventing hospitalization and death, then within a matter of months said he was “certain” of the need for a third vaccine dose:
And a month later claimed that the “need” was to prevent sickness.
But how well has the booster rollout actually worked to prevent people from becoming infected with COVID?
Well as one example, we can look at the states of Rhode Island and Vermont.
These are the two most vaccinated U.S. states, where incredible numbers of people have gotten vaccinated.
91% of all residents in the two states have had at least one vaccination dose, so it should come as no surprise that over 50% of their populations have had a booster dose as well.
How well has all that boosting done in preventing infections in those states?
It’s safe to say it’s not going well.
60% of everyone over 18 who’s been vaccinated in Vermont has had a booster shot. At least 95% of adults in Vermont have been vaccinated.
70% of everyone over 50 in Vermont has had a booster.
77% of everyone over 65 in Vermont has had a booster.
The numbers are similar in Rhode Island, where 53% of adults, 66% of those over 50 and 75% of seniors have had a booster.
So how well are those impressive numbers working to prevent infections?
Rhode Island currently ranks first in the United States in population adjusted case rate and Vermont ranks third.
Nailed it again, Fauci.
That should be enough on its own (along with the other ten million times he’s done this) to discredit him, but of course, it just gets worse. There’s Iceland.
Vermont and Rhode Island are full of Trump supporting anti-vaxxers compared to Iceland.
~60% of the entire population of Iceland has had a booster shot, even including those who aren’t eligible.
75.1% of adults have had a booster shot. Everyone over 18 in Iceland has gotten an additional dose at the rate of seniors in Rhode Island and Vermont.
This is remarkable uptake, as high or higher than anywhere on earth.
So how well is a world leading booster uptake doing to prevent people from getting infected with COVID?
Unsurprisingly, it’s not working at all.
Iceland actually breaks down adult case rates by vaccination status, which is helpful in several ways. But first, let’s look at what it currently shows and then dive in a little deeper:
Yes, you’re reading that correctly; fully vaccinated people in Iceland have the highest case rates by a fairly significant margin. And these numbers likely include those who are partially vaccinated as “not fully vaccinated".”1
Yet no one seems to grasp the impossibility of fully vaccinated people having the highest infection rates in Iceland while jurisdictions in the United States *cough, New York and California* present purposefully misleading and statistically impossible data after doing “age adjustments.”
Obviously those with a booster dose are showing the lowest case rates, but those rates are more than double what the rate was for the “not fully vaccinated” group as recently as early December.
That’s all the more impressive given that Iceland didn’t even begin rolling out boosters to most of the adult population until November 15th.
Not only are booster doses not preventing people from getting sick, they’re not preventing it *immediately after being given*.
This isn’t waning immunity after six months; most adults haven’t been boosted long enough to see their immunity wane. They’re just not preventing infections at all. It’s even worse when considering the delay between getting the third dose and being considered “boosted” in terms of the data.
We can also see a lack of societal impact in macro level hospitalization numbers, Marin County has 80% of seniors boosted and hospitalizations just reached a new record high for the area:
It was even evident by late November that boosters had no impact on population level hospitalization increases:
How in the world did Fauci get this so wrong?
The answer, of course, is that Fauci has absolutely no idea what he’s doing.
He never has.
He seems to make it up as he goes, based on the political trends and whatever his ideology demands.
He was wrong about herd immunity due to vaccinations (which will require an entire post in and of itself), he was wrong about masks working to stop the spread, cloth or otherwise, wrong about school closures, lockdowns and social distancing, wrong (and purposefully misleading) about the lab leak theory, and so it’s no surprise that he would be wrong about boosters too.
There are few people on earth so consistently and comprehensively incapable of accuracy. His opinions, like his advice, are utterly useless. Booster doses are not preventing people from getting sick or infected with COVID.
There was never a reason to expect them to prevent infections, even as countries roll them out in yet another desperate and futile attempt to control something they can’t control while skillfully avoiding any discussions of risks and benefits.
Fauci is the poster child of failed COVID policy and the dangers of unlimited hubris by what’s ostensibly a public servant, and there’s very little chance of the world returning to actual normality until he’s out of office. Booster shots are just the latest example of his assumptions being wildly incorrect.
Oh but don’t worry, it can always get worse — Quebec is making the third shot mandatory, based on nothing:
The Science™.
It’s not immediately clear from the download if Iceland includes partially vaccinated as “not fully” or if they’re excluded
And by the way, I ran out of space to talk about Israel. We might need an entire post just about Israel.
Getting sick is not just an inevitable part of life, it is a part of the definition of life itself. As a multi-celled organism, we are in equilibrium with multiple different cell, virus, and contaminant types. The life of an organism is in a constant balancing act with the environment. Getting sick is an attempt by the body to reestablish the balance. If we managed to eradicate all the pathogens, we would all die of autoimmune diseases. The entire philosophy of the CDC is wrong.
The best example of their ignorance is how long it took them to stop recommending that children not be exposed to peanuts in order to prevent peanut allergies. Anybody with a basic understanding of the immune system would understand that the allergies were actually being caused by a lack of environmental exposure while the immune system was developing. We couldn't eradicate the allergy by eradicating the allergen. And we can't eradicate disease by eradicating viruses even if that was somehow possible.