WASHINGTON (LifeSiteNews) — America is “not done” with COVID-19 vaccines, White House COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci declared in an interview published Monday.
“The answer is: We don’t know. I mean, that’s it,” Fauci told CNBC in the interview. “It is likely that we’re not done with this when it comes to vaccines,” due to the finite nature of the protection they offer, which wanes after around six months and does not prevent passing the virus on to others.
“Everybody wants to return to normal, everybody wants to put the virus behind us in the rearview mirror, which is, I think, what we should aspire to,” Fauci acknowledged, but while “we are going in the right direction” in terms of declining cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, “we have gone in the right direction in four other variants” before statistics worsened again.
“The problem here and throughout the world is that the memory of what happened fades very quickly,” Fauci added. “I would hope that this completely catastrophic experience that we’ve had over the last two-plus years will make it so that we don’t forget, and we do the kind of pandemic preparedness that is absolutely essential.”
Fauci’s assertion that COVID shots may continue to be necessary flies in the face of mounting data that the shots have failed to end the pandemic. The federal government considers more than 216 million Americans (almost 65% of the eligible) to be “fully vaccinated” (a moving target given the vaccines’ temporary nature), yet data from Johns Hopkins University reported last October shows that more Americans died of COVID-19 by that point in 2021 (353,000) than in all of 2020 (352,000). The Moderna vaccine has been available throughout all of 2021; the Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson shots were made available in late February.
In fact, rising cases among the vaccinated have led some to suspect the shots, which are widely claimed to at least reduce COVID’s severity, may actually impair recipients’ ability to fight off future infections. Last November, Alberta family physician Dr. Christy Reich argued that data from Alberta Health Services (AHS) “show[ed] an initial spike in COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths within the first two to three weeks of receiving the first dose of the vaccination, and “after the second dose, you see a small initial increase in cases but then an elevation in cases again in two to six months.”
While Reich granted that one explanation could simply be that “people aren’t being as careful once vaccinated,” another possibility endorsed by others in her medical group was that the “vaccine is decreasing people’s immune function and making them more predisposed to catching illnesses or fighting off conditions currently in remission.”
Worse, many Americans continue to harbor serious reservations as to the COVID vaccines’ safety, stemming in large part from the rushed nature of their creation. The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative developed and released the shots in a tenth of the time vaccine development usually takes and a quarter of the time it took the previous record-holder, the mumps vaccine, yet their advocates have done little to address the concerns of the hesitant.
During a COVID-19 vaccine hearing held by U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) last month, attorney Thomas Renz presented medical billing data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) showing that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, 487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).
In a statement to left-wing “fact-checking” outlet PolitiFact, the Defense Health Agency’s Armed Forces Surveillance Division spokesperson Peter Graves confirmed the existence of the records but claimed that a conveniently-timed “data corruption” glitch made the pre-2021 numbers appear far lower than the actual numbers of cases for those years, which PolitiFact took at face value.