Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) and as Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden during Covid-19, today testified to Congress about Covid vaccines and Covid’s origin.
"The first iteration of vaccines did have an effect — not 100%, not a high effect — they did prevent infection, and subsequently, obviously, transmission,” Fauci said. “However, it's important to point out something that we did not know early on that became evident as the months went by: the durability of protection against infection, and hence, the transmission was relatively limited."
But there was never definitive evidence that the vaccines would prevent transmission. In December 2020, the FDA determined that “data are not available to make a determination about how long the vaccine will provide protection, nor is there evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person.”
The CDC in 2020 and 2021 stated that protection would wear off, that the evidence was unclear, and that the data were limited, noted data analyst Kelley K during the hearing.
When Fauci said in May 2021 that a vaccinated person would become a “dead end to the virus,” he was repeating a political talking point and not accurately representing the science. Claiming vaccination would prevent spread was a strategy to increase vaccine uptake among young, healthy people who were not vulnerable to severe COVID outcomes.
In other words, the science had not been “settled,” but Fauci and other public health leaders chose to espouse a noble lie to encourage vaccination.
To his credit, Fauci testified before Congress today and sat for many hours of a transcribed interview. But Fauci also implied that investigating his role put him at risk. “Every time someone gets up and says I'm responsible for the death of people throughout the world,” he emphasized, “the death threats go up.”
We unreservedly condemn any threats Fauci and his family may have received. It is illegal to threaten people with death or physical violence, as it should be. At the same time, we must be free to discuss Fauci’s role in funding the laboratory research to make coronaviruses more infectious, known as “gain-of-function research,” without fear of being accused of inciting violence against Fauci or his family members.
It would be an abuse of power to suggest that any effort to hold Fauci accountable is equivalent to threatening him or his family. The responsibility for making threats lies with the person making them and not with those whose statements have ostensibly influenced them.
And yet many Democrats repeatedly suggested that there was something sinister and dangerous about criticisms of Fauci for his role in shaping the US response to the pandemic as well as his role advocating for and funding the kinds of biomedical research that may have caused it. And Democrats repeatedly referred to the idea that US taxpayer dollars funded the research that resulted in the creation of SARS-CoV-2 a “conspiracy theory.”
