Dr. Fauci Admits to Lying about Herd Immunity

Dr. Anthony Fauci Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Disease Control, and one of the main medical experts advising the Trump administration’s COVID response, has been recently caught in a long-running lie. 

Most people already know that Fauci had previously lied when he said Americans should not wear masks, as a way of ensuring PPE for nurses and doctors, but his ongoing lie regarding herd immunity had been going unchecked for a long time.

Although 60-70 percent resistance to disease is typically what is classified as herd immunity and even the World Health Organization has been sticking to that range for COVID, Dr. Fauci started out at that range and has slowly been ticking up his estimate despite the stance of the majority of the medical community.

Dr. Fauci started at 60 to 70 percent, then 75, then 80, then 85, and even recently stated that up to 90 percent resistance in the population may be needed for herd immunity to be reached. 

Dr. Fauci at one point even stated in an interview with The New York Times, that “we don’t know what the real number is,” despite his seeming confidence in continuously raising the rate required.

Later on, in the same interview, Dr. Fauci said that based on polling on openness to vaccination, and discoveries of new COVID strains, he gradually shifted his estimates on what percentage of resistance in the population constitutes herd immunity, assuming Americans were becoming more open to it being a higher number than before.

This has drawn criticism from more conservative Americans and Republican politicians as Dr. Fauci is just flatly admitting to making statements for political expediency and continuously shifting the goalposts to higher standards while not even knowing what the herd immunity number should be.

Senator Marco Rubio considered a more moderate Republican, called out Fauci today saying that “Dr. Fauci lied about masks in March. Dr. Fauci has been distorting the level of vaccination needed for herd immunity…It isn’t just him. Many in elite bubbles believe the American public doesn’t know ‘what’s good for them’ so they need to be tricked into ‘doing the right thing.’”

Dr. Fauci is displaying an attitude of many people who consider themselves politicians and cultural elites, that being a feeling they don’t owe the general public the full truth and are allowed to dishonest or outright lie if they believe it is good for society. 

People like Dr. Fauci are not badly motivated but instead seem blinded by their own power/expertise to the point that they discount the ability of the general public to gauge risk and make their own informed and rational choices.

From this perspective, it is easy to see how so many of these elites don’t seem bothered by their own lies and blatant hypocrisy.

In the case of many politicians breaking their own lockdown orders and being scene dining out soon after passing stricter lockdown measures, they imbue such a lack of self-awareness you’d wonder if they see themselves on a higher physical and moral plane of existance than everyone else.