July 2, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — “It’s almost like it’s going to be two Americas,” White House COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN’s Don Lemon in an interview June 29, ginning up anxiety about a COVID-19 variant which he said has “a high degree of efficiency of spread.”
Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the chief medical adviser to the president, claimed that low rates of vaccination in specific regions of the United States will lead to increased susceptibility to the so-called Delta variant.
The Delta variant has been traced to India and was previously known as the Indian variant, before it was renamed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to “simplify public communications.”
“If you have such a low level of vaccination superimposed on a variant that has a high degree of efficiency of spread, what you are going to see in under-vaccinated regions, be they states, cities, or counties, you’re going to see these individual types of blips,” said Fauci. “It’s almost like it’s going to be two Americas.”
“If you are not vaccinated, you are at considerable risk,” claimed Fauci.
The Delta variant is being closely tracked by the U.K. government where it has been especially widespread. The numbers released by the government indicate that the Delta variant presents a low risk of death, with Public Health England reporting a case fatality rate of 0.1 percent. Since most COVID-19 cases are undetected, the actual death rate is likely to be even lower.
Writing for The Dossier, investigative journalist and foreign policy analyst Jordan Schachtel said, “Through my previous reporting, I’ve found that the World Health Organization runs its numbers based on the estimate that 1 in 20 cases are detected, while the CDC bases its estimates on a 1 in 10 ratio.”
“In plain [E]nglish,” said Schachtel, “this means that based on CDC and WHO guidelines, the Delta variant’s death rate is actually significantly lower than the 0.1% number that appears in the U.K. government docs.”
In an MSNBC interview on June 30, Fauci first expressed optimism about the Delta variant’s potential impact in the U.S., extolling the high rates of vaccination. Currently, more than 50 percent of U.S. adults are “fully vaccinated,” including well over 80 percent of elderly Americans. However, Fauci said the “problem” is states and regions — mostly in the southern U.S. — in which vaccination rates remain low, in some places below 35 percent.
It is unclear what vaccination percentage will be considered sufficient. Dr. Fauci has admitted in the past to moving vaccination goal posts based on polling data.
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Fauci told the New York Times in April. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
In the June 30 MSNBC interview, the NIAID director said he had been on several road trips recently to “try and drum up interest in getting vaccinated.” He suggested that emphasizing fear of the Delta variant has resulted in some people deciding to take the shot who otherwise might have opted out.
“You’re starting to see when people realize the threat of this very, very difficult and problematic variant, that they’re changing their mind[s],” he said.
“It’s so patently obvious,” Fauci asserted, “that if you are vaccinated you have a high degree of protection.”
Fauci’s statements do not appear to align with official statistics released by the U.K. government, which indicate that in those over the age of 50, most cases and deaths connected to the Delta variant have been among those who were vaccinated.
Nonetheless, Fauci joins like-minded scientists and members of the media in insisting that Americans ought to respond to the news of the Delta variant by getting vaccinated immediately.
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said the Delta variant is replacing the “Alpha” variant, which has been reported to be more transmissible than the original strain which came from Wuhan, China.
“We need to vaccinate now,” Offit concluded. “Get everyone vaccinated now.”
“You have to ask yourself the question, what is the problem here?” Fauci said on MSNBC. “We have a situation that could be devastating that is entirely avoidable and entirely preventable.”
While Fauci admitted “there will be people who are vaccinated who might get infected,” he said “that’s going to be a very, very low number, relatively speaking.”
Fauci said that instead of mask-wearing (which he is currently saying is unnecessary for those who have gotten the jab), Americans just need to get vaccinated. But he expressed approval for guidance recently put out by Los Angeles County encouraging everyone, regardless of vaccination status, to continue wearing masks.
“The better part of valor is, even if in fact you are vaccinated, [you] want to just diminish even more this very small risk,” Fauci said.