LOL Anthony Fauci, August 18, 2020: "You cannot force someone to take a vaccine"

 Starting at the 20:00 mark.

In December of last year Anthony Fauci said 50% vaccination would be enough to have an impact on the number of infections

Wrong again.

The United States has added 7 million cases since achieving 50% vaccination with one dose on June 1, and that spike continued strong despite achieving 50% full vaccination on August 14.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's senior official for infectious diseases, predicts the United States could begin to achieve early stages of herd immunity against the deadly coronavirus by late spring or summer. And if that happens, Fauci anticipates, "we could really turn this thing around" toward the end of 2021.

In a wide-ranging interview Tuesday on Morning Edition, NPR's Rachel Martin asked Fauci how many Americans need to receive the vaccine to have an impact on the number of COVID-19 infections.

"I would say 50% would have to get vaccinated before you start to see an impact," Fauci said. "But I would say 75 to 85% would have to get vaccinated if you want to have that blanket of herd immunity."

 

 

 

It's amazing how wrong Anthony Fauci was last November but people still have faith in whatever he says

"Certainly it’s not going to be a pandemic for a lot longer, because I believe the vaccines are going to turn that around,” Fauci said. “Vaccines will help us. What we’ve got to do is just hang on and continue to double down on the public health measures.” ... The public also needs to be prepared for the likelihood that protection against the virus -- whether from vaccines or from fighting off Covid -- will probably only last for a year, perhaps two, he said. That’s based on experience with similar viruses and the growing number of documented cases of people being infected with this coronavirus twice, he said.

 

CNN shares blame with Anthony Fauci and MSNBC for hyperbolic, irresponsible coverage of India variant: Breakthrough cases are supposed to be mild, not deadly

 

When is the White House going to reign in Anthony Fauci for exaggerating about the Delta variant?

This is the CDC slide with the Delta comparison to Alpha which Fauci grossly exaggerated on MSNBC. It clearly states the Delta is 10 times worse than the Alpha for viral load, not 1,000 times as Fauci incorrectly stated. The White House claims to be upset about stuff like that.

Har-dee har har har.

 

Anthony Fauci falsely stated on MSNBC that with the Delta variant "the level of virus in their nasopharynx is about 1,000 times higher than with the alpha variant"

Nope. He's wrong. CDC says 10 times higher than with the Alpha, not 1,000 times. 

Infection with the Delta variant produces virus amounts in the airways that are tenfold higher than what is seen in people infected with the Alpha variant, which is also highly contagious, the document noted.

The amount of virus in a person infected with Delta is a thousandfold more than what is seen in people infected with the original version of the virus, according to one recent study.

The C.D.C. document relies on data from multiple studies, including an analysis of a recent outbreak in Provincetown, Mass., which began after the town’s Fourth of July festivities. By Thursday, that cluster had grown to 882 cases. About 74 percent were vaccinated, local health officials have said.

From The New York Times here. 

Here is Fauci getting it wildly wrong.

Is he just getting too old for this, or is this a deliberate attempt to whip up hysteria about Delta?

 

The CDC Follies

First we were told, most publicly by Fauci in February 2020, that masks won't protect you from the COVID virus. Wash your hands, we were told. Fauci lied to us because PPE was in short supply and was needed by hospitals. They were trying to conserve supplies for hospital workers, because masks work in hospitals, you know.

After the first hospitalization wave subsided, masking gradually became cool again. People wanted to get out and about, so wearing a mask and practicing social distancing became the default position. The authorities realized this would help to keep a lid on things while vaccines were developing.

America divided over this politically, to state the obvious.

When the vaccines began to roll out in late December, the same psychology took over. The vaccine, like a mask, became a ticket back to normalcy. At first, however, the CDC had said a mask would still be necessary after vaccination, but eventually bowed to pressure from freedom advocates, and to overcome the vaccine hesitancy into which the advice to keep wearing a mask kept feeding. The authorities finally relented in May after vaccination enthusiasm had peaked in April and declined quickly, and said the vaccinated could in fact retire their masks after all.

 

This was too little, too late.

 

The share of population dosed at least once moved fewer than ten points from mid-May to July 4th, from 47% to 55%. 

The Biden administration severely undershot its goal of 70% vaccinated by July 4th. It completely miscalculated that vaccine enthusiasm would peak in mid-April.

But now, two months since May, the CDC today is back to saying that masking is necessary after vaccination, ostensibly because the India variant is so virulent that even vaccinated people could still catch it and transmit it.

 

Talk about poking the hornets' nest.

 

The real reason is that breakthrough cases at elite levels are calling attention to a wider spread phenomenon everyone knows about anecdotally but can't quantify because the CDC in May conveniently refused to count all the breakthrough cases like it counts cases generally. These vaccines are failing all over the place in the basic sense of preventing illness.

 

Of course, this isn't going to convince anyone to get vaccinated, because vaccines are supposed to prevent illness, and if they aren't, well, why bother?

 

These aren't real vaccines like the childhood vaccines are real vaccines. Their power peters out quickly and people can and do get COVID-19 anyway. At best these are therapeutic medications which might turn out to be appropriate for certain people, but certainly not as a panacea for the whole nation.

 

NBC actually did a pretty good story laying out many of these details, here, draped in the usual propaganda.

 

The future outlook, unfortunately, remains very uncertain.

 

 

 

US COVID-19 charts update for Sunday 6/13/21

 Alles in Ordnung.

Cases per million are steady at the new lows.

Deaths per million continue to fall to new lows.

Hospitalizations are almost 10 times lower than they were at the peak in January.

Test positivity is bouncing off the bottom at 2%.

Despite non-stop vaccination propaganda, the curve is bending with not quite 52% having received at least one dose.

Click on any chart to enlarge.

The UK variant continues to dominate in every US state, with prevalence well over 50% in most places. The latest scare from Fauci is about an India variant, but so far prevalence of an India variant is highest only in Arkansas at 10.1%. A Brazilian variant has 25.1% prevalence in Illinois. New York variants are prevalent in a range of 20-22% in New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina.

 

Fauci and others are not wrong to make comparisons between influenza and COVID-19 in terms of infection spread

One year of COVID-19 infected ~ 8.67% of the US population.

The average influenza year produces a similar result: about 8%.

Deaths are another matter entirely.

A typical flu year involves 36,000 deaths, or about 11/100k at current population.

COVID-19 gave us roughly 515k deaths in one year, March on March, or about 155/100k.

C19 has been 14 times more deadly than the flu.

But will it continue to be?

At this same point last year there were about 27k more dead from C19 than there are today, 108k vs. 81k.

Keep in mind that there are only just so many people with comorbidities and other vulnerabilities to fuel the death fire.

Fredo Fauci on US mortality rate for COVID-19 vs. influenza

Anthony Fauci should have known better than to make a mistake like this in March 2020, saying the coronavirus mortality rate was 2%, but I think he's getting beat up over this unfairly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He meant case mortality rate.

Technically that's not a thing, but that's how most of us were talking at the time, as a synonym for case fatality rate. Admittedly using the word "mortality" in this way only confuses matters. And to this day. Yes, I'm talking about Alex Berenson.

Fauci was, after all, responding to the popular press, understanding correctly how the popular press talks about these matters.

Mortality rate is a technical measure of the number of deaths in a particular population per unit of time, usually annual, usually expressed as the number of deaths per 100,000 of population (not per cases!). Since the virus was barely 3 months old, any annual rate could only be a projection, not an observation, and I don't think Fauci was so foolish as to be making such a projection based on not even three months experience with a new virus.

The implications of a 2% mortality rate would be astounding. It would mean 2% of the US population dying over the course of a year, or 6.6 million. The quick spread of the virus from China to the rest of the world by aircraft was reason enough to think this magnitude of death was possible if in fact prevalence of the disease were to dwarf that for influenza.

I don't think Fauci meant that. I think he meant case fatality rate, which fluctuates with cases and necessarily declines over time. One person gets sick with something new and dies, the case fatality rate is automatically 100%. The second case survives, the rate falls to 50%, and so on. CFR is a function of cases.

Mortality rate is function of population and time.

His flu comparison shows that he didn't mean the mortality rate technically understood. He didn't technically give the "mortality rate" for the flu.

He gave the case fatality rate for flu, which is 0.1%.

Prevalence of influenza in the US is roughly 8% of population annually on average (the morbidity rate). In any given year roughly 8% of the population gets the flu. 8% of 328 million people is 26 million cases, 0.1% of which die every year, or 26,000. If the prevalence is a little higher, you'll get more deaths. Just one more point of prevalence gets you to almost 30 million cases and 30,000 deaths, and so on. And that's what we've actually experienced in the US. As the population has aged, more older people have experienced flu which kills. Annual cases for all groups have come in at an average of almost 30 million for the last decade. Deaths have averaged almost 36k per year.

That's an average annual case fatality rate of 0.12%, just as Fauci indicated in the email.

So it's pretty clear to me that Fauci was not referring to the technical "mortality rate", but to the "case fatality rate". We were all talking about it, sloppily.

Here's how COVID-19 in the United States actually looks after what amounts to one year, using covidtracking.com data through March 7, 2021, when it quit its data gathering operation, from which we can calculate an actual mortality rate because it had been a year (population figure is US Census for Sep 7, 2020, the mid-way point, at 331.7774 million):

Confirmed US cases C19 to 3/7/21: 28.7565 million

Cumulative hospitalized to 3/7: 0.8786m

Cumulative dead to 3/7: 0.5152m

% cases hospitalized: 3.06

% cases dead: 1.79 (case fatality rate)

% population infected: ~ 8.67 (morbidity rate, very similar to influenza)

% pop. hospitalized: ~ 0.26

% pop. dead: ~ 0.16 (mortality rate).

 

Now let's compare COVID-19 to flu in terms of the "mortality rate", technically understood, expressed per 100k of population.

To 3/7/21, 515151 C19 deaths per 331.7774 million people works out to 155 deaths per 100k.

Average annual flu deaths of 36,000 per 331.7774 million people (0.011% of population) works out to 10.85 deaths per 100k (In 2019 it was 15.2/100k).

Thus COVID-19 in the US after one year has a mortality rate 14.3 times worse than for the flu on average. Its case fatality rate, 1.79%, has been 14.9 times worse than for flu's average 0.12%.

Fauci's 2% estimate in March 2020 was good enough for government work.

FOIA'd Fauci email shows his top people informed him 31 Jan 2020 that the coronavirus looked engineered and was inconsistent with evolutionary theory

In other words, it might have come out of a lab, not out of nature by crossing from bats to some unknown animal intermediary found at the Wuhan wet market.

 

The real reason Trump & Co. didn't want you to panic

To avoid the Federal Reserve Bank having to intervene to rescue the economy, that's why. But, too late.

The Fed dropped its benchmark interest rate to 0% this afternoon and will restart QE with $700 billion in Treasury and mortgage security purchases. It knows tomorrow is going to be rough.

The reason isn't to boost the stock market, though there is no doubt they hope that would be a happy by-product of their action.

Because economic activity has dived with all the cancellation going on in order to stop the virus from spreading, there is extreme pressure on overnight funding markets which businesses use to fund their operations. Their income has tanked but they still have bills to pay. Borrowing in the funding markets is critical for the survival of far too many companies. The addition of so many more entities having to go to the funding markets than is usual, and in larger quantity, under these new and dire circumstances means money markets will not have enough liquidity to meet these new demands. So, the Fed will step in to keep things well lubricated.

That's it.

This could have been avoided if Trump had simply shutdown the country on Feb 1 like Xi Jinping shutdown Hubei on Jan 23. China is over the hump on the epidemic there because it acted early to contain the infection. We are just getting started, and unfortunately we are looking more like Italy than South Korea. The virus was still capable of being isolated here on Feb 1. Since then it has spread everywhere because we foolishly permitted travelers to come and go, creating hot zones everywhere. Now it's payback time.

This is going to be really ugly unless Trump acts immediately to do what Fauci wants, which is a 14-day shutdown. People need to shelter in place for a few weeks.

You won't care about an economy in flames if you can't breathe because a killer pneumonia has you gasping for breath.

What Dr. Anthony Fauci really said today, contrary to Rush Limbaugh: Many, many millions could die

When pressed by lawmakers for an estimate of eventual fatalities in the U.S., Fauci said it will be “totally dependent upon how we respond to it.”

“I can’t give you a number,” he said. “I can’t give you a realistic number until we put into the factor of how we respond. If we’re complacent and don’t do really aggressive containment and mitigation, the number could go way up and be involved in many, many millions.”

Read.

NIH's Anthony Fauci says quarantine of 2,666 passengers and 1,045 crew on Diamond Princess cruise ship wasn't unreasonable but failed

Story.

"The quarantine process failed," Fauci said. "I'd like to sugarcoat it and try to be diplomatic about it, but it failed. People were getting infected on that ship. Something went awry in the process of the quarantining on that ship. I don't know what it was, but a lot of people got infected on that ship."