Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily has a bad habit of uncritically repeating misleading COVID-related articles it found on anti-vaxxer websites. An anonymously written Feb. 8 article served up another one:
Dr. Anthony Fauci ended up looking arrogant and narcissistic when he was making demands that Americans wear COVID masks, take experimental shots and such during the pandemic.
After all, he had the nerve to solemnly announced, "I am science."
It was just as he was leaving his highly paid government post that reports started appearing about "dirt" on him.
That came as members of Congress pointedly said he'd be needing to answer their questions.
Now a report from Just the News makes Fauci look even worse.
It cited a paper produced by the government, including Fauci, that suggested federal health officials "knew COVID vaccines were doomed from the start."
"Decidedly suboptimal," was the conclusion.
The report explained, "Anthony Fauci knows why COVID-19 vaccines have been so unreliable at halting infection and transmission beyond a few months. He waited until he stepped down as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to publicly explain it."
The medical journal Cell Host and Microbe has published a "perspective" led by Fauci's office in the government showing NIAID had "good reason" to think the experimental shots "would fail."
Because this comes straight from social media and not actual journalists, you will not be surpised that our anonymous WND writer's interpretation is highly misleading. As an actual news organization reported:
“The article DOES NOT say these vaccines don’t work, just that they don’t work as well as we want them and need them to work,” Morens wrote in an email Friday.
In their paper, the authors acknowledge that current vaccines for the flu, COVID and other respiratory viruses aren’t effective in protecting against any and all illness over a person’s entire life, whereas vaccines for other respiratory illnesses such as measles, mumps, and rubella effectively confer lifetime immunity.
They then suggest exploring new approaches to respiratory virus vaccines. That includes, among other things, utilizing a “nasal spray or even a lung spray; trying different vaccine schedules and repeat doses; seeing if there is a way to boost the innate immune system,” according to Morens.
“The only thing new in this paper is the tying together of well known scientific and public health knowledge into a bigger picture of challenges to development of new vaccines,” he wrote. “It asks, in essence, OK, these vaccines aren’t perfect, so what are some of the things we might try to do to improve them?”
Fauci, in a separate email, stressed the COVID-19 vaccine has proven effective in preventing the severest symptoms that could lead to hospitalization and death.
“That is the life-saving aspect of the vaccine,” he wrote. “Point in question: I got infected even though I was vaccinated and boosted, but I had a very mild infection. Given my age, if I had not been vaccinated, the chances are that I might have gotten severely ill.”
Juliet Morrison, a microbiology professor at the University of California, Riverside, agreed that the social media posts are misleading.
“There is no ‘bombshell’ here,” she wrote in an email, referencing how some online are characterizing the piece. “The paper is saying that the current approach doesn’t work as well as it could, so we need to explore new approaches.”
Megan Ranney, deputy dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, added that credible scientific research backs up the paper’s premise.
“That claim is hogwash,” she wrote in an email. “The data is clear (and the paper is clear) that Covid vaccines have significantly decreased severe disease and hospitalization, and that they decrease (but do not eliminate) infection and transmission.”
WND won't tell you any of this, of course -- instead, it tried to manufactiure a conspiracy theory: "The report noted the paper was published with no evidence of peer review, raising the possibility 'that authors Fauci, his senior scientific adviser David Morens, and Viral Pathogenesis and Evolution Section Chief Jeffery Taubenberger could time the submission so its publication wouldn't cause problems for the then-NIAID leader.'"
