Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been saying for months that 60-70% is the level of COVID-19 infection/vaccination the country needs in order to achieve herd immunity. However, in a recent telephone interview with the New York Times’ science and health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr., Dr. Fauci is now claiming that medical experts don’t really know what the ‘real number’ is to get the country back to normal.
Dr. Fauci spent months claiming that 60-70% was necessary for herd immunity, then spent the last month slowly upping the figure. In a previous Times article, Dr. Fauci cited 70-75%. He then cited 75-80-plus percent in a CNBC interview, then cited that the figure would be closer to 90% in another Times interview. He used multiple statistics to emphasize the “umbrella of immunity” that will protect even the most vulnerable people or those who have not been vaccinated.
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. 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 90, 85. We need to have some humility here. We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent,” Dr. Fauci explained.
Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly, but deliberately, been moving the goalposts based on his gut feeling of how the public would react. He needed the voluntary acceptance of vaccines to bounce back up in the polls since Americans were reporting being skeptical of taking a vaccine. His opinions were not based on scientific evidence, but rather what he thought the country needed to hear.
In his most recent New York Times interview, Dr. Fauci said he was comfortable drawing the line at 90% herd immunity because he doesn’t think COVID-19 is more infectious than the measles. “I’d bet my house that COVID isn’t as contagious as measles,” he said.
Social media critics pointed out that there’s a lot of gaslighting going on for all the science. The radical left has told us for months that herd immunity didn’t apply to COVID-19 and was a stupid idea. They are constantly changing the narrative to maintain control. “Dr. Fauci admitted lying to the American people about masks, in order to conserve them for health workers. He has now admitted lying about the herd immunity threshold so that we would be more likely to get vaccinated. What else is he lying to us about?” Another user tweeted.
The herd immunity theory was based on the principle that children could build their own immunity after being exposed to it, particularly the measles in the early 1900s. It had nothing to do about vaccinations, but the radical left will try to maintain control of the narrative however they can.
