White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci is warning vaccinated Americans of a coming “double whammy” as winter approaches and the Delta variant of the Chinese coronavirus spreads, citing “waning immunity” and essentially warning that vaccinated individuals are not fully protected.
Speaking in an interview debuted at the 2021 STAT Summit Tuesday, Fauci said:
The somewhat unnerving aspect of it is that if you keep the level of dynamics of the virus in the community at a high level — obviously the people who are most most vulnerable are the unvaccinated — but when you have a virus as transmissible as delta, in the context of waning immunity, that dynamic is going to negatively impact even the vaccinated people. So it’s a double whammy.
“You’re going to see breakthrough infections, even more so than we see now among the vaccinated,” Fauci added.
“It is painful and frustrating to me as a public health person, as a physician who takes care of people and sees firsthand what disease and death is, repetitively,” he said as the conversation drifted to unvaccinated individuals.
“As you said, it just doesn’t make any sense, it’s almost inexplicable. But it is what we are dealing with,” he said.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head — who has come under a great deal of scrutiny over the course of the pandemic over his flip-flopping on masks as well as his denial of funding gain of function research in the Wuhan lab — also seems to be moving the goalposts, suggesting that booster shots “are ultimately going to become a part of the standard regimen and not just a bonus.”
“I believe it’s extremely important for people to get boosters, and I am hoping very soon we will see a situation where there won’t be any confusion about who should and should not get boosters,” he said in an interview with Axios.
“In my opinion boosters are ultimately going to become a part of the standard regimen and not just a bonus,” he added.
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