Government officials persuaded the CDC director to back away from saying the shots did not prevent transmission or infection, according to the diary.
Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top government officials worked on multiple occasions to prevent messaging about COVID-19 vaccines that they felt was too negative, according to Fauci’s diary.
Fauci wrote in an entry on Aug. 13, 2022, that he, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, and others worked to persuade Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not to say that COVID-19 vaccines “were not effective at all in preventing infection and transmission.”
Fauci said that the statement would have conflicted with the recent recommendation that Americans receive yet another booster, against the BA.5 strain.
“In addition, it would undermine the [Department of Justice’s] efforts at mandates for vaccines under certain circumstances,” Fauci said.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who released Fauci’s diary, said in a statement: “Officials would not admit the vaccine was not stopping spread because it might weaken the legal case for mandates. That is not science. That is a cover-up to justify coercion.”
Other officials have discussed in private the nexus between vaccine decisions and mandates imposed during the Biden administration. Emails previously made public, for instance, showed that Food and Drug Administration officials rushed the approval of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to enable mandates.
Fauci also said in a separate August 2022 entry that he was told in a phone call that then-White House chief of staff Ronald Klain was angry at Walensky “for wanting to come out with a statement that the vaccines do not protect against infection at all.”
Fauci wrote: “I have to look at the data but I think that although protection against true infection is low to modest at best, it is not zero and so I cannot figure out, and I am sure that this is what is bugging Ron, why the CDC needs to put that statement out now exactly at the time when we are pushing people to get the new BA.5 variant in early to mid-September.”
Fauci declined to answer questions about his diary during a July 29 hearing in Washington, and he has not returned requests for comment. Walensky and Murthy did not respond to emails requesting comment.
Early Concerns
After federal regulators in late 2020 granted emergency authorization for two COVID-19 vaccines, the CDC recommended the shots for most people.
Because of waning efficacy, in 2021, officials began discussing whether to recommend booster doses.
Fauci had mentioned before the emergency authorization that boosters would possibly be needed because immunity against coronaviruses typically lasted only up to one year. He began writing in his diary about concerns about vaccine effectiveness as early as Jan. 9, 2021.
“It looks like the vaccine might be compromised,” he wrote in one entry.
Other data provided reassurance in the coming months, particularly against severe disease, Fauci said.
In the summer of 2021, though, Fauci began regularly writing about data emerging from Israel that indicated that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine protection dropped within weeks of injection against the new Delta virus variant.
Fauci initially said that the protection against serious illness still appeared to hold up, and the CDC and FDA told Americans they did not need a booster. During a meeting with Fauci and other advisers at the White House on July 16, 2021, President Joe Biden said he was concerned that his goal that the country “mark independence” from COVID-19 was in danger.
“We spoke to him about the importance of emphasizing that vaccinated people do not get severe disease even from the Delta variant. In addition, we pointed out the possibility that we may need to give booster shots, namely a third dose following the two doses of the mRNA vaccine,” Fauci wrote, referring to shots from Pfizer and Moderna that use messenger ribonucleic acid technology.
Later in July, Fauci spoke with Naftali Bennett, Israel’s prime minister at the time, who said that his country would be providing boosters to elderly individuals. Two weeks later, Fauci said that data from Israel suggested that hospitalizations were increasing among vaccinated people.
A group of government officials, among them Fauci and Walensky, on Aug. 18, 2021, said that the government was recommending booster shots because protection from the vaccines “begins to decrease over time following the initial doses.”
The government later recommended annual boosters that were targeted to emerging strains, since protection started lower than before and dropped quickly.
