Dr. Anthony Fauci is among the growing number of officials who are acknowledging that the COVID-19 vaccines don’t work well against infection.
Vaccines against both COVID-19 and influenza have “deficiencies,” including that they “elicit incomplete and short-lived protection against evolving virus variants that escape population immunity,” Fauci, until recently President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, and top National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials wrote in a recent paper.
The flu vaccines are suboptimal and have not improved in decades, the officials said. As newer strains of the COVID-19 virus have emerged, the problems with the COVID-19 vaccines have become apparent and are reminiscent of the flu shots, they said.
“With the imperfections of these vaccines, it seems a public health imperative to aggressively pursue better vaccines and vaccination strategies,” they added later, before acknowledging that “none of the predominantly mucosal respiratory viruses,” such as COVID-19, “have ever been effectively controlled by vaccines.”
Fauci was joined by Drs. David Morens and Jeffrey Taubenberger, who are top officials at the NIH.
“That is just an amazing admission,” David Wiseman, a former Johnson & Johnson scientist, told The Epoch Times. Wiseman noted that earlier in the pandemic, officials portrayed people as only needing a primary series of a COVID-19 vaccine for near-perfect protection. Fauci infamously claimed in 2021 that vaccinated people “become a dead end to the virus” and herd immunity would be achieved when enough people got a shot.
Fauci was the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 until late 2022. He is reportedly still employed by the government, and was listed as being a government official in the paper, but is no longer listed in the Department of Health and Human Services employee directory. The NIH and the institute have not responded to requests for comment.
Other experts have also been acknowledging the limitations of the vaccines, which are performing worse against the newly dominant strain in the United States.
Dr. David Kessler, who was Biden’s chief science officer for COVID-19 until mid-January, told Politico recently that the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission.
