Popular article decontextualizes Fauci’s comments on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines
Clinical trials and out-of-laboratory performance have shown that the COVID-19 vaccines available in the United States are safe and effective. Dr Anthony Fauci did not admit that “Covid vaccines can actually ‘make people worse’,” as one viral headline tendentiously asserts. Comments made by Fauci in March 2020 about tests to detect potential safety problems in future vaccines were taken out of context.
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In a live interview broadcast in March 2020, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) discussed the pandemic. coronavirus, including evaluating the safety and effectiveness of potential COVID-19 vaccines. But one of the answers offered by Fauci during that interview conducted 21 months ago, before Facebook became a Meta in October 2021, was taken out of context to give the false impression that the doctor recently said that the vaccines that have been approved and authorized would do more harm than good.
The biased headline of a December 14 article posted on TrendingPolitics.com reads: “Dr. Fauci admits that Covid vaccines can really ‘make’ people worse: ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’
“Dr. Anthony Fauci sat down with ‘Meta’ CEO Mark Zuckerberg and finally said out loud what many people have warned for over a year about rushed mRNA vaccines: They may make the Covid pandemic worse,” Kyle wrote. Becker, author of the article that has been shared more than 3,500 times on Facebook alone, according to statistics from CrowdTangle. Equally biased comments have also been published On twitter.
“Dr. Fauci was commenting on a recent study that showed that Covid vaccines can contribute to a recipient being more likely to be infected again than someone with natural immunity from a previous infection,” Becker wrote. “‘It would not be the first time, if it happened, that a vaccine that initially looked good in terms of safety, actually made people worse,’ said Fauci,” according to the article, which included a fragment of just 26 seconds that decontextualizes Fauci’s comments.
But Becker distorts when Fauci made his comments and what he said then about testing future COVID-19 vaccines, which happened before clinical trials showed the vaccines are safe and effective.
As we previously said, the interview was streamed live on Facebook in March 2020, not recently, as the article suggests. Furthermore, Fauci and Zuckerberg never commented on a “recent study” comparing vaccine-induced immunity against COVID-19 and natural immunity. It would not have been possible for that study to have been conducted or completed at the time Fauci made his comments two years ago.
(Notification: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations who work with Facebook to disprove incorrect information shared on social media).
Fauci and Zuckerberg comment on the pandemic
In the section of the interview referred to in the Trending Politics article, Zuckerberg asks why health authorities might be hesitant to “aggressively” push for a safe vaccine, even if its effectiveness is unknown. In his response, Fauci continues to emphasize the importance of conducting clinical trials to determine the safety of the vaccine before it is distributed. Fauci cites examples of candidate vaccines against other viruses, such as HIV and respiratory syncytial virus, that were found to be harmful during the evaluation process.
Here’s a transcript of that nearly 38-minute portion of the interview, which begins around minute 22 of the video below. We underline the 26-second snippet in the transcript, but include the question and answer in their entirety to provide appropriate context.
Zuckerberg, March 19, 2020: One of the questions that I have heard from several people is: obviously it is very important to do safety tests because you want to make sure that you are not going to inject people with something that can be harmful; But once you know that, why not push for a more aggressive distribution, even if you don’t know exactly how effective it is? What is the public health rationale, or thinking behind the need to prove that something is extremely effective before distributing it, knowing that it is safe?
Fauci: Okay, that’s a good question. The initial safety study, Mark, is to see if, are there any particular or unusual reactions if I inject it into the arm? There is another element related to safety and that is: if you vaccinate someone and that person creates an antibody response and then is exposed and infected, does the response that you induced strengthen the infection and make it worse?
And the only way to know is by doing an extensive study, not in a normal volunteer who is not at risk of infection, but in people who are at risk. This wouldn’t be the first time, if it happened, that a vaccine that initially looked good for safety has actually made people worse. There was a history in children of the respiratory syncytial virus vaccine that, paradoxically, made children worse. One of the HIV vaccines we tested several years ago left individuals more likely to become infected.
So you can’t just go and distribute it unless you feel that, on the ground, when someone is infected and exposed, the vaccine is not going to make it worse. That is why you have to do a clinical trial.
Importantly, Fauci said he “has to do a clinical trial” first, and “if it happened” that the vaccine “actually made people worse” then “it wouldn’t be the first time.”
That’s not an admission that the Pfizer / BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, which underwent rigorous clinical trials, exacerbate COVID-19, as the article may have readers believe. Instead, Fauci spoke about a hypothetical situation prior to the completion of the testing phase and the subsequent authorization and approval of COVID-19 vaccines.
The strengthening of the disease by antibodies, as Fauci called it in the interview, and as we have previously published, occurs when a previous infection or vaccination generates antibodies that do not neutralize the virus, but rather strengthen its ability to infect cells. Which can trigger a more serious illness rather than prevent it.
For example, as Fauci mentioned, clinical trials during the 1960s revealed that children who received a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine were more likely to contract or die from pneumonia following RSV infection. , as noted by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia on its website on strengthening antibody disease. The disclosure prompted researchers to end clinical trials, and the vaccine was not approved or distributed to the public, the hospital notes.
However, doctors and other medical experts we interviewed this year told us that there has been no indication that COVID-19 vaccines exacerbate the disease, a condition known as ADE.
“Neither the COVID-19 disease nor the new COVID-19 vaccines have shown evidence of causing ADE. People infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, are not likely to develop ADE after repeated exposures, “says the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “Similarly, studies on vaccines in the laboratory with animals or in clinical trials with people have found no evidence of ADE.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that, as of the end of November, more than 459 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been administered in the United States and that only in “unusual cases” did vaccinated people “experience serious health incidents”. We have noted some of these rare reactions in our Vaccine Safety Briefs.
Translated by Luis Alonso Lugo.
Editor’s Note: SciCheck Vaccination / COVID-19 Project it is made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control on the editorial decisions of FactCheck.org, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation. The project’s goal is to increase access to accurate information about COVID-19 and vaccines, and to reduce the impact of misinformation.
