This weekend, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared on CNN and said local officials should be doing more to mandate COVID-19 vaccines. He added the federal government would not require them.
“I do believe at the local level there should be more mandates,” Fauci said. “We’re talking about a life-and-death situation. We’ve lost 600,000 Americans already, and we’re still losing more people. There’ve been 4 million deaths worldwide, so I am in favor of that.”
Dr. Fauci asserted that the COVID-19 vaccinations are as good as fully approved:
“The amount of data right now that shows a high degree of effectiveness and a high degree of safety is more than we’ve ever seen with emergency-use authorization,” he said. “These vaccines are as good as officially approved, with all the I’s dotted and the T’s crossed.”
The COVID-19 clinical trials were compressed and accelerated to obtain emergency use authorizations in under a year. Normal vaccine development and approval, according to Johns Hopkins, is five to 10 years to demonstrate efficacy and safety. While it makes sense that the efficacy data is robust, we know from history that safety issues can take time to appear.
This phenomenon occurred in 2016 with the dengue virus vaccine deployed in the Philippines. Data from 20 years of development and trials by the manufacturer showed that some children given the vaccine ended up with a potentially fatal plasma leakage syndrome. It turns out that the vaccine was only safe for children and adults who had already had an initial infection with dengue. By then, over 100,000 Philippine children who had never had an infection had received the vaccine. The vaccine ended up increasing the risk of hospitalization with dengue from 1.1% to 1.6%. At the time, NPR noted the following:
But in the world of vaccines, that’s not an acceptable risk. A risk needs to be exceedingly small to be tolerated. For example, with the measles vaccine, the risk of encephalitis is about 1 in 1 million, or 1,000 times less than the risk from a measles infection, WHO says.
Global health researchers knew significantly more about the dengue virus than they currently do about SARS CoV- 2 before they deployed the vaccine.
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Severe cumulative side effects have also been seen in drugs fully approved by the FDA. Vioxx was a popular drug fully approved for the treatment of arthritis. After full approval in 1994, it was withdrawn by Merck in 2004 after research linked the drug to thousands of fatal heart attacks. Dr. David Graham, an FDA investigator, told Congress the outcome of Vioxx was “a disaster,” one that is “unparalleled in the history of the United States” and that “constituted an unprecedented failure of the nation’s system of drug approval and oversight.”
The FDA has also pulled drugs after they received approval for use over the counter. In April of 2020, the FDA requested the withdrawal of all ranitidine products, originally sold under the brand name of Zantac, after it found unacceptable levels of a potential carcinogen increased under proper storage conditions. Zantac was approved in 1983 and first marketed over the counter in 1998. Millions of Americans had taken it by the time the potential issue was detected. The FDA had not found a definitive link to any form of cancer, but the carcinogen levels were simply unacceptable to the FDA. Amazing how the whole bureaucracy just lowered its standards for COVID-19.
Dr. Fauci’s statement to host Jake Tapper is a bet that history does not support, given that all three of these approved therapeutics went through much more extensive safety studies and still had unacceptable consequences. Even more disturbing is Fauci’s increasingly hysterical tone. Earlier in the weekend, he politicized the virus again, incorrectly, telling Americans to stop making a political statement by refusing to get one.
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For the vast majority of healthy Americans under 50, COVID-19 is not a life-and-death situation. In children under 18, the risk of death is near zero. Yet here Fauci is making claims he can’t possibly support regarding safety and supporting mandates on all Americans. He has never explained why a recovered patient needs to be vaccinated or provided any data showing that people who had COVID-19 get reinfected in large numbers.
There has never been a mandate for a vaccine that the Food and Drug Administration has not fully approved. If fully approved in under 5-10 years, the COVID-19 vaccines would be alone, especially given the fact that they include the first mRNA therapy in humans. To make a vaccine mandatory for adults outside the military would also be unprecedented in the United States. The West articulated these principles of medical ethics and self-determination in the Nuremberg Code after the Nuremberg trials. No government emergency powers should be allowed to supersede those protections and none ever have to date.
Today the FDA announced that it would be placing a warning on the Johnson and Johnson COVID-19 vaccine over a potential link to Guillain-Barré, a rare autoimmune nerve disorder. According to the Mayo Clinic:
Guillain-Barre (gee-YAH-buh-RAY) syndrome is a rare disorder in which your body’s immune system attacks your nerves. Weakness and tingling in your extremities are usually the first symptoms.
These sensations can quickly spread, eventually paralyzing your whole body. In its most severe form Guillain-Barre syndrome is a medical emergency. Most people with the condition must be hospitalized to receive treatment.
This warning comes after another for myocarditis and pericarditis, especially in younger males, following the mRNA vaccines. In one of the most closely monitored populations, the military, myocarditis was about three times higher than expected following the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. The cases occurred in physically fit males, ages 20 to 51, with no history of heart disease.
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After these findings come the obligatory statements: “Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Janet Woodcock said last week the benefits of the vaccine far outweigh the risks”; “The chance of having this occur is very low, and the rate of reported cases exceeds the background rate by a small degree.” The problem is health experts and vaccine makers have never been able to make these assessments about treatment for an individual outside of some of the worst tragedies in our medical history.
Why would Dr. Fauci support anyone at the local level implementing mandates now? Especially in low-risk populations like young adults and children? After following the research and media on COVID-19 for eighteen months, I can only think of two reasons. One is a profit motive. The other is that he knows something he is not sharing. Our political leaders in Congress need to find out which one it is before we have an unforeseen tragedy on our hands.
