Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top immunologist in the U.S., acknowledged on Tuesday that vaccines against COVID “don’t protect overly well” against infection but are still necessary.
Fauci, who recently got the virus despite being vaccinated and boosted, told Fox News that the jabs are still important because they can keep people from getting severely ill.
“One of the things that’s clear from the data [is] that even though vaccines – because of the high degree of transmissibility of this virus – don’t protect overly well, as it were, against infection, they protect quite well against severe disease leading to hospitalization and death,” he said.
“And I believe that’s the reason … why at my age, being vaccinated and boosted, even though it didn’t protect me against infection, I feel confident that it made a major role in protecting me from progressing to severe disease,” he also said. “That’s very likely why I had a relatively mild course.”
Fauci, who serves as a top adviser on COVID to President Joe Biden, also still recommends Americans get the shots.
“My message to people who seem confused because people who are vaccinated get infected – the answer is if you weren’t vaccinated, the likelihood [is] you would have had [a] more severe course than you did have when you were vaccinated,” he said.
When Fauci, 81, contracted COVID earlier this month, he decided to take Paxlovid, Pfizer’s antiviral for people at greater risk of complications.
He initially had minimal symptoms but took the drug when he began to feel worse. After the five-day course of the medication, he said he felt “really quite well” for a while, aside from some fatigue and a bit of congestion.
“It was sort of what people are referring to as a Paxlovid rebound,” Fauci said during a remote interview with the Foreign Policy Global Health Forum, ABC reported.
The news site noted that Paxlovid is approved for people in the U.S. with “mild-to-moderate symptoms” and “at significant risk of progressing to severe illness.”
Fauci’s comments came shortly after a panel of independent advisers that works with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended producing new COVID vaccines to target the Omicron variant.
By a 19-2 vote, the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) approved a plan to have new vaccines ready by early October. The panel said the newly formulated vaccines are needed because new subvariants of the Omicron strain appear to be able to bypass antibodies delivered via previous vaccines.
That would mean Americans could be urged to take a fourth shot, with fifth shots for the immunocompromised and people over 50 years old.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent for a national newspaper. He was also the a.m. editor of the Drudge Report for four years. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.
Source: Dailywire
