Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), admitted on Monday that the vaccines developed against COVID-19 were not effective at stopping infections and transmissions in the long run.
Testifying before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Monday, Fauci insisted the vaccines helped protect against the worst aspects of the disease but were less effective in preventing infections.
“Something that we did not know early on, that became evident as the months went by, is that the durability of protection against infection and hence transmission was relatively limited,” Fauci said, “whereas the duration of protection against severe disease, hospitalization, and deaths was more prolonged.”
Committee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) then asked Fauci if the COVID-19 vaccines were “100 percent effective.”
“I don’t believe any vaccine is 100 percent effective,” Fauci replied.
As the hearing went on, Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) asked Fauci why he and other government health officials promoting the COVID-19 vaccines did not speak out sooner about the vaccine’s limited ability to prevent infection and transmission.
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The U.S. military and federal and state employers were all subject to vaccine mandates. President Joe Biden also sought to impose a mandate on private employers with 100 or more employees, before the U.S. Supreme Court struck the order down.
Cloud said he was troubled by the idea that many healthy American people who were not at significant risk of dying from COVID-19 were still compelled to take it on the basis that it would prevent infections and thus transmission to potentially more vulnerable people.
“People lost jobs, they lost livelihoods, I had rural hospitals in my area that did not have a single case of Covid in their rural community that had to shut down and people not get care that they did need for cancer and some passed away because of those kind of things,” the Texas Republican said.
Cloud said he felt there had not been much of a shift in public messaging about the vaccine’s efficacy from Fauci and other public health officials even after early data began to demonstrate its limitations. Cloud argued that “there’s a lot of grace” for the initial period of limited information about the origins and impacts of COVID-19, as well as the vaccines developed to protect against the virus, but that the general public never heard a change in messaging as time went on and the facts became more evident.
“We never heard this messaging coming from you or from anyone else who stood on the sidelines talking about these things, and it’s left the American people with a tremendous distrust,” Cloud said.
