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Fauci on Natural Immunity and Vaccinating Children
Dr. Fauci was recently interviewed on CNN. My comments are in bold.
GUPTA: And just real quickly, there was a study that came out of Israel about natural immunity, and basically, the headline was that natural immunity provides a lot of protection, even better than the vaccines alone.
What do people make of that? So as we talk about vaccine mandates, I get calls all the time, people say, I’ve already had COVID, I’m protected. And now the study says maybe even more protected than the vaccine alone. Should they also get the vaccine? How do you make the case to them?
FAUCI: You know, that’s a really good point, Sanjay. I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that. That’s something that we’re going to have to discuss regarding the durability of the response. The one thing that paper from Israel didn’t tell you is whether or not
as high as the protection is with natural infection, what’s the durability compared to the durability of a vaccine? So it is conceivable that you got infected, you’re protected, but you may not be protected for an indefinite period of time.
So, I think that is something that we need to sit down and discuss seriously, because you very appropriately pointed out, it is an issue, and there could be an argument for saying what you said.
We’ve been living with COVID since the beginning of 2020 and the Biden administration, which Fauci advises, is issuing mandates which require people to either get the jab or be tested weekly. Now they’re talking about requiring people to have had the vaccine to board airplanes. Natural immunity is a well-accepted concept. Recently, we’ve been hearing that the vaccine is only good for six months or so. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya 18 months ago stated that natural immunity would probably be good for years. And now Fauci says it’s something that should be discussed. What the heck has he been doing for the last 18 months? It appears that about a third of the population has natural immunity. Doesn’t that drastically change the picture about how vulnerable the unvaccinated are.
COOPER: And where are we on kids below the age of 12 getting — you know, whenever the trials will be done that kids can get vaccinated under the age of 12.
FAUCI: Yes, well, good question, Anderson. There’s a timetable for that. Right now, if you look at the testing that’s being done now that we’re doing together with the pharmaceutical companies is that Pfizer is a bit ahead of Moderna in the testing of that age group. So, we likely will get enough data to present to the F.D.A. for the possibility of an emergency use authorization, somewhere around the end of September, the beginning of October.
How long it’s going to take them if they decide that they want to go the EUA route, it may take a few weeks after that to make the determination.
Moderna is just a few weeks behind, maybe two weeks behind, so they’re going to get enough data for an EUA, probably mid to end of October. So within the next several weeks to a month, a month and a half, we should have enough data to make a determination, is it safe? And is it effective to give it to children who are 11 years of age and younger?
It’s been clear since almost day one that Covid is heavily age-sensitive. School children without comorbidities are at no risk from this. The long-term effects of the vaccine are unknown. It appears that the jab can cause heart problems for young men. Why are they pushing vaccines on people who get NO benefit from them? That’s unscientific and insane.
Published in Healthcare
They must have mountains of data by now. It’s astounding that they aren’t bothering to look at it. Data on reinfection should be easy to find, yet when I searched recently, all the sources I checked on said, basically, “There’s little data on it, but it seems to be rare.”
We should have readily accessible numbers.
And then you have these crazy people who are brainwashing the masses with fear.
There is the experience of Manaus, Brazil that doesn’t give confidence that a high level of natural immunity will protect from future outbreaks. The last I read, the analysis is incomplete or maybe too many open questions to draw acceptably final conclusions.
Everything we read that is expertly written leaves open the door for changes in what they see because it is still evolving. An expert cannot be precise when precise answers do not exist. Everything we read that has precise answers is more political than factual.
It seems to me to be not unlike a war, where the enemy is changing tactics (variants) and being very stealthy.
In terms of examining natural immunity, the CDC cited data from one state, Kentucky, that suggested the vaccine granted slightly more immunity than natural immunity. But they have data from all 50 states! Why did they only cite one state? Was it because that was the only state that gave them the result they wanted?
It was from a case-study and not just data crunching. So, would not have been available from other states unless other states did the same or similar case-study.
Call me a curmudgeonly old weirdo, but everything Fauci says I run through the “here’s a 40 year bureaucrat who once did some good but let the genie out of the bottle and has to cover it up” filter. When I do that, everything he says seems to make sense.
Dr. Fauci’s perpetual narrow-mindedness remains a problem. At the beginning of the pandemic, he dismissed all other health and wellness concerns (suicides, heart disease, cancer, mental health, childhood learning, even other communicable diseases) as irrelevant distractions from his singular focus on Covid-19. More recently, he has maintained a narrow-minded focus on vaccines, to the exclusion of considering natural immunity and he studiously avoids exploring potential treatments for those who become ill.
I’m not a Fauci fan. His specialty is immunology. One thing I’ve learned when dealing with experts in any field, they simply do not know what they do not know. If I were to be called in to consult on the thing which I do, I would not be addressing the things I do not do. It would be up to the people that call me in, to call in other experts on those other things.
“The American public, I guess understandably, has an issue with the concept of a new risk. You live with risks every day. [But] when a new risk comes in that’s far less risky than the risks that you’re living with, you get panicked about the new risk.” – Fauci, as quoted by The Atlantic.
Bozo the fauci thinks that the wuflu can be eliminated. If I listened to him, I would still be wearing a burkha and hiding in my basement.
Right. If your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. To an immunologist heading an agency captured by the pharmaceutical industry, any solution that doesn’t look like vaccine patented by Big Pharma might as well be invisible.
I appreciate the link. I think he had a point. I’ve driven on the beltway. I wonder if he would say the same about the risk of COVID-19.
That’s my point. He seems to have changed his tune. I think that he: knew COVID came from a lab, knew the US paid for the research even after Obama stopped it, and figured he better run around and make like he was taking it serious to ward off any backlash.
None of that is to say that COVID isn’t serious, it is. I just think he is working toward some sort of CYA activity. “Look at all the things I did to protect Americans!!!”
Fauci lied and people died. Never has so much money be spent on something, when so little was learned. Climate Change is probably close.
Not defending Fauci, but Ebola is not COVID-19. Ebola outbreaks seem to be relatively easy to contain, compared to COVID-19.
Fair point.
Richard, good post.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say that “the vaccine is only good for six months or so.” I think that there’s quite a bit of evidence that the effectiveness of the vaccine declines over time, but the extent of such a decline is not yet clear.
I agree with you, very strongly, about the issue of vaccinating kids. I think that you overstate the case, only very slightly, when you claim that kids get no benefit. The risk of Covid to kids is not zero, but it is extraordinarily tiny, and I don’t see how vaccination of those under 18 is warranted on a cost-benefit basis. Particularly where, as you correctly point out, there is the possibility of unknown risks from the vaccine.
If the benefit of the vaccine is pretty big, as seems to be the case for people over 60 (and arguably for people over 40), then it can make sense to take the unknown risk of a long-term problem. But for a 12-year-old, who is practically Godzilla when it comes to fighting Covid?
I don’t know why our public health officials, and media, seem unable to present the facts in a sensible manner.
Perhaps they don’t want to.
Present “facts,” that is.
Very good questions! I suspect that when a study begins to give other than the preferred answer, that study is shelved.
If I were fauci, I would have given up by now unless there was something else that could come out that I couldn’t live with people knowing, and I needed to stay in the game to prevent this new knowledge from getting out, or to spin it if it did.
One thing I’ve never read is an explanation as to why kids are less susceptible to the virus.
Okay, I get that they are kids. But what else?
We don’t have time to study that! Just shut up and jab ’em! Do as you’re told!
Not a big Fauci fan- but he is correct on the point of we do not know the durability of the immune response after infection acquired immunity (I think the term natural immunity is a very poor word choice-it isn’t natural it is post infection). There is even data out there that vaccine acquired immunity is better than “natural immunity”-but all the science is preliminary. It is more difficult than just measuring blood antibodies since cell mediated immunity is a critical part of the immune response. We will probably all need booster shots at some point-but when isn’t clear.
one example of vaccine immunity better than “natural”-https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.07.21262725v1
We’ve had longer to study natural immunity than vaccine-acquired immunity. Yet, natural immunity is treated like a conspiracy theory, and vaccine immunity is treated like the gold standard.
Why aren’t we studying natural immunity? The data is there.
Here’s a good start: see how many people have had COVID more than once. It’s in everyone’s medical records.
What? You’re saying it would be a HIPAA violation to access those medical records? That’s funny? They had no problem giving those medical records to the contact tracer who called us.
I think they aren’t interested in studying it.
I trust nobody.
Fauci talks about an expected emergency use authorization for a vaccine for children, but he doesn’t mention that this is not allowed when there are other remedies available, i.e., therapeutic interventions. Putting aside the inconvenient fact that an emergency cannot not be established at all in the case of children, one might reasonably conclude that this requirement is why such interventions are not merely discouraged but in effect forbidden. Here is the FDA’s language: Under an EUA, FDA may allow the use of unapproved medical products, or unapproved uses of approved medical products in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions when certain statutory criteria have been met, including that there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives. [emphasis added] https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/emergency-use-authorization-vaccines-explained
I has to do with testosterone assisting the virus replication or something. Children have low levels.
What was the one thing he did good?
Something something about their receptors.
Smokers and ex-smokers are also weirdly protected. Not like I didn’t wait 20 years to hear that …