How the American establishment lied about the COVID-19 vaccine and its ability to "eliminate COVID-19"--according to the science we knew at the time
A thorough debunking of a false public health propaganda campaign that did untold harm to science
I apologize to readers for providing scant few updates over the past few weeks. I have been busy with moving and with writing a newspaper op-ed that turned out to be far more difficult and time-consuming than I thought it would be. A large number of articles will be forthcoming in the coming weeks. - Kevin
Three years ago yesterday, on May 16, 2021, NIH’s NIAID Director Anthony Fauci claimed that the COVID-19 vaccine makes “you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere.” [1]
This was a lie.
And it was part of his participation in a long-standing campaign of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine that involved almost every aspect of the establishment, from public health, to the legacy media, to law, to the tech companies.
Fauci’s implication was that by getting vaccinated, one would prevent the spread of the virus to others and bring an end to the pandemic, analogous to measles or smallpox vaccination suppressing or eliminating pandemics—an idea that Fauci and countless figures in the public health establishment and media promoted throughout the pandemic in what can only be described as a massive propaganda campaign.
A propaganda campaign that, as we shall see, was anti-science from the beginning.
For instance, as Fauci said when interviewed for the Harvard Gazette on December 10, 2020:
“Let’s say we get 75 percent, 80 percent of the population vaccinated. If we do that, if we do it efficiently enough over the second quarter of 2021, by the time we get to the end of the summer, i.e., the third quarter, we may actually have enough herd immunity protecting our society that as we get to the end of 2021, we can approach very much some degree of normality that is close to where we were before.” [2]
He repeated the same false narrative on June 22, 2021 in a White House Press Conference:
“The Delta variant is currently the greatest threat in the U.S. to our attempt to eliminate COVID-19.” [3]
Eliminate COVID-19.
The problem is that this was scientifically impossible. And scientists knew this.
Fauci either intentionally misled the American people, or he was scientifically incompetent.
Yet this had throughout 2021 become the dominant understanding of the purpose of the vaccine, thanks largely to Fauci’s (and Walensky’s) misinformation.
To see this, let us revisit a public WHO press conference from December 28, 2020. In it, several of the world’s top experts sharply contradicted the narrative that Fauci had been pushing for months up to that point. They knew Fauci was spreading misinformation, and they were trying to correct the record.
Dr. David Heymann, Professor of London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said:
“The world has hope for herd immunity, that somehow transmission would be decreased if enough persons were immune. This concept has been widely misunderstood and still cannot be predicted because of our lack of understanding of immunity and its duration. It appears at present that the destiny of SARS Coronavirus 2 is to become endemic, as have four other human coronaviruses.” [4]
Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, WHO’s Chief Scientist, said:
“At the moment I don't believe we have the evidence of any of the vaccines to be confident that it's going to prevent people from actually getting the infection and therefore being able to pass it on.” [4]
Dr. Mike Ryan, Executive Director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme seconded Dr. Heymann:
“The first and primary objective is to decrease the impact that this disease is having on people’s lives. … The second phase is then looking at how will this vaccine affect transmission. … We just don’t know enough yet about length of protection and other things to be absolutely able to predict that. … A decision then to move towards elimination or eradication of the virus requires a much higher degree of efficiency and effectiveness in a vaccination programme and all of the other control measures. And we still don’t know, based on virus evolution, based on so many other things. The likely scenario is the virus will become, as David Heymann said previously, another endemic virus, a virus that will remain somewhat of a threat, but a very low-level threat in the context of an effective global vaccination programme.” [4]
Scientists at the World Health Organization had several points. The COVID-19 vaccine:
Might not reduce transmission of the virus enough;
Might not produce enduring immunity;
Might not protect against future variants.
With regard to transmission, on December 17, Harvard professor Marc Lipsitch, in a very comprehensive review on the website of Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics website, wrote:
“Evidence from animal and human studies to date and evidence from other infections leads this observer to think that the vaccine may reduce transmission 50-70%. This is not a confident prediction and could well be wrong in either direction.” [5]
With regard to waning immunity, it was long-known that coronavirus immunity rapidly waned with frequent reinfection being common, as one experimental trial from 1990 showed [6] and many observational studies from the 1970s and 1980s showed [7,8].
An extremely high-profile study from September 2020, using modern methods, published in Nature Medicine, confirmed these older findings [9].
Starting in November 2020, the alpha variant was sweeping through Western populations at the time of the WHO press conference and would achieve dominance in March—further confirming these scientists’ concerns [10].
The position of scientists at WHO was confirmed in a piece published by Nature on March 25, 2021 by Christie Aschwanden entitled “Why Herd Immunity For Covid Is Probably Impossible” [11].
In it, Aschwanden, citing a range of COVID-19 vaccine experts, repeated the above and added three additional reasons:
Vaccine hesitancy;
Delayed rollout to children;
Behavioral changes.
On March 30, 2021, in a CNN article interviewing prominent scientist Christopher Murray at the University of Washington would add to this list seasonality: the infectivity of COVID-19 was highly likely to change across the seasons [12].
Suffice to say, it was common knowledge among scientists that it was a highly dubious claim that the vaccine would end the pandemic.
Although later observational studies suggested that the reduction of transmission could be temporarily as high as perhaps 80% if both parties were vaccinated (and which would rapidly wane), interpreting these findings to mean that the pandemic could be ended by the vaccine glossed over the number of other important considerations already mentioned.
It was not so much that “science evolved”, and thus scientists like Fauci and Walensky had to change their messaging.
It was more that the science was ignored.
The outcomes are familiar:
A loss of trust in public health and science [13];
An increase in vaccine hesitancy, including record declines in childhood vaccinations [14];
Violations of human rights due to mandates;
Loss of healthcare workers due to mandates [15];
An undermining of the democratic process.
This could all have been avoided, if the authorities had just told the truth and let America decide.
It was our choice what to do with the information provided; it is the job of scientists to tell the truth.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-dr-anthony-fauci-face-the-nation-05-16-2021/
[5] https://ccdd.hsph.harvard.edu/2020/12/17/covid-19-vaccines-and-herd-immunity/
[6] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2170159/
[7] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3008551/
[8] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/216378/
[9] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1083-1
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Alpha_variant
[11] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00728-2
[12] https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/30/health/herd-immunity-covid-shifts/index.html
Transparency at the level of government is long overdue. Maybe we can’t handle the truth, but it’s time we at least try.