TITLE: Lab Leak Is Not a Conspiracy Theory, Anthony Fauci Concedes
https://reason.com/2024/01/10/lab-leak-is-not-a-conspiracy-theory-anthony-fauci-concedes/
EXCERPT: Former White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Fauci doesn't believe the lab leak explanation of COVID-19's origins is a conspiracy theory. He admitted as much during a closed-door grilling session before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Monday. Legislators did not release a transcript of his testimony, but Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R–Ohio), the chairman of the subcommittee, published some highlights on X (formerly Twitter).
In recent months, Fauci has denied he ever categorically rejected the possibility that COVID-19 accidentally escaped from a laboratory. But he faces very serious allegations that he deterred scientific experts from considering it. At issue is "The Proximal Origin of Sars-CoV-2," a paper that appeared in Nature Medicine, a scientific journal, in March 2020 at the very start of the global pandemic. Fauci—who was then head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—and Francis Collins—then director of the National Institutes of Health—participated in a conference call with the authors, whose initial openness to a lab leak explanation changed significantly prior to publication. The paper ultimately ruled out a lab leak as not just "unlikely"—the phrasing used in an early draft of the paper—but "improbable."
More recently, Fauci has contended that he always remained open to the idea, but was persuaded by scientific arguments—including those in the proximal origin paper—that a zoonotic spillover was more likely. This claim would be more persuasive if Fauci had not stated over and over and over and over again, in media interviews, that he "strongly favored" the zoonotic origin theory; his subsequent suggestion that he did not lean in either direction is flatly contradicted by his literal words.
It was certainly in Fauci's interest to downplay the possibility that human experimentation on viruses accidentally unleashed COVID-19 upon the world; during his career, Fauci remained one of the foremost advocates of public funding for gain-of-function research, in which scientists manipulate viruses in order to make them deadlier and more transmissible. Fauci and other public health experts have straightforwardly denied that the U.S. funded such research in Wuhan, China, but critics say this is an exercise in semantics. Indeed, EcoHealth Alliance—a U.S. nonprofit that obtained public funding to conduct research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China—was caught actively misleading Pentagon officials about the nature of the experimentation: Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, advised colleagues to deceive regulators about the fact that the research would be conducted in China under laxer lab safety standards.
A cadre of elite scientists deliberately lied to U.S. security officials in order to spend American tax dollars performing risky experiments under substandard laboratory conditions in a notoriously secretive and authoritarian foreign country. Maybe those experiments created COVID-19, and maybe they didn't. In any case, it's clearly not a conspiracy theory; good of Fauci to recognize the obvious, however belatedly it might be.
TITLE: COVID ‘6-feet’ social distancing ‘sort of just appeared,’ likely lacked scientific basis, Fauci admits
https://nypost.com/2024/01/10/news/fauci-admits-to-congress-that-certain-covid-social-distancing-guidelines-lacked-scientific-basis-sort-of-just-appeared/
EXCERPT: Dr. Anthony Fauci confessed to lawmakers Tuesday that guidelines to keep six feet of separation — ostensibly to limit the spread of COVID-19 — “sort of just appeared” without scientific input.
Fauci, 83, revealed to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that the “six feet apart” recommendation championed by him and other US public health officials was “likely not based on scientific data,” according to Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who is also a physician.
Schools nationwide remained closed well into the second year of the pandemic as a result of the social distancing guidelines, which were disputed by both research studies and other health officials.
“It never struck me that six feet was particularly sensical in the context of mitigation,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health who served as President Biden’s COVID response coordinator for 15 months, told the New York Times in March 2021.
Those “failures” included foisting vaccination mandates on schools and businesses.
“After two days of testimony and 14 hours of questioning, many things became evident. During his interview today, Dr. Fauci claimed that the policies and mandates he promoted may unfortunately increase vaccine hesitancy for years to come,” Wenstrup said.
Those “failures” included foisting vaccination mandates on schools and businesses.
“After two days of testimony and 14 hours of questioning, many things became evident. During his interview today, Dr. Fauci claimed that the policies and mandates he promoted may unfortunately increase vaccine hesitancy for years to come,” Wenstrup said.
TITLE: US verges on vaccination tipping point, faces thousands of needless deaths: FDA
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/anti-vaccine-nonsense-will-likely-kill-thousands-this-season-fda-officials-say/
EXCERPT: Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year found that, for the third consecutive year, vaccination rates among kindergartners had continued to slip, with rates of non-medical vaccination exemptions rising to an all-time high. There are now 10 states with vaccination exemption rates over 5 percent, meaning that even if clinicians and health officials manage to vaccinate all non-exempt children, the state will not be able to reach the target of 95 percent coverage needed to curb the spread of disease on a population level.
Califf and Marks lamented that the efficacy of vaccines that prevent "disturbing" suffering and deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases, such as the extremely contagious measles, is no longer visible for people in the US. Thus, vaccines' benefits are under-appreciated, and vaccination rates are slipping, particularly in small pockets of the country.
"Regrettably, pediatric vaccine hesitancy now has been responsible for several measles outbreaks in the US, including a recent one in central Ohio involving local-acquired cases in 85 children, 36 of whom (42 percent) had to be hospitalized for complications," Califf and Marks write.
A measles outbreak is ongoing in Philadelphia, where an unvaccinated person who contracted the virus outside the US exposed other unvaccinated people at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an area daycare. So far, eight cases have been confirmed (one adult and seven children), six of which were hospitalized. Some of the cases occurred when an infected unvaccinated child broke quarantine and attended the daycare.
While childhood vaccination rates suffer and bygone diseases flare, there's also concern for older people and more familiar diseases. The respiratory virus season is now peaking. Influenza-like illness activity—which can capture not just flu but also RSV and COVID-19—is high and rising throughout much of the country, posing a high risk to older people. Flu is infecting the most people right now, but COVID-19 is causing more than six times more deaths, with over a thousand deaths a week in recent weeks. Yet, the CDC estimates that only about 19 percent of adults have gotten the latest COVID-19 vaccine booster so far, while nearly 45 percent have gotten their annual flu shot.
Califf and Marks pose the question of what can be done to reverse course, and they point to a possible solution of calling on doctors, nurses, and even pharmacists to speak up about the benefits and importance of vaccination. Clinicians who provide care remain the most trusted sources of information for health decisions, they write.
"We believe that the best way to counter the current large volume of vaccine misinformation is to dilute it with large amounts of truthful, accessible scientific evidence," they conclude. They called on health care providers to take every chance to help people make well-informed decisions about vaccinations. "By doing so, we can both help prevent pediatric infectious diseases and dramatically reduce the harm from pathogens such as COVID-19, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus [RSV] disease before we have another large wave of any of these vaccine-preventable illnesses."