- Health
Fauci quoted out of context in misleading video, didn’t change his views about benefits of COVID-19 vaccines
Key takeaway
The benefits of COVID-19 vaccines outweigh their risks. Scientific evidence shows they are highly effective at protecting against severe disease and death and reduce the risk of transmitting the disease to others. Infections can still occur in vaccinated people, but they’re mostly milder than infections that occur among unvaccinated people.
Reviewed content
Verdict:
Claim:
Fauci changed his views on COVID-19 vaccines benefits; Fauci’s remarks show that COVID-19 vaccines don’t work as advertised
Verdict detail
Misrepresentation of sources: Fauci’s quotes were taken out of context. When viewed in its entirety, the August 2024 MedPage Today interview actually showed that Fauci didn’t change his position about the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines and acknowledged that infections could still occur in vaccinated people.
Full Claim
Fauci changed his views on COVID-19 vaccine benefits; COVID-19 vaccines don’t work as advertised; "what a beautiful excuse to make instead of just saying you were wrong"; "when you get 6 shots but still keep testing positive"
Review
A video comparing two interviews of Anthony Fauci, the former director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), went viral on social media in August 2024. The video was viewed more than 1.5 million times across different posts on Facebook.
The video juxtaposed excerpts from two interviews given three years apart, in 2021 and 2024, respectively. In the first interview from 2021, Fauci is quoted as saying, “When people are vaccinated, they can feel safe they are not going to be infected”. In the second interview from 2024, Fauci mentioned that he contracted COVID-19 for the third time despite having been vaccinated six times.
Some posts containing the video were captioned in ways to imply that Fauci was now contradicting his past remarks. For instance, one user wrote that arguing that “science changes as more information comes out” is “a beautiful excuse to make instead of just saying you were wrong”. Another wrote “when you get 6 shots but still keep testing positive”.
The video and these captions implied that Fauci was either being inconsistent or had quietly changed his views about the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccines. Overall, the posts interpreted his remarks as an acknowledgement that COVID-19 vaccines don’t work as initially claimed.
It’s not the first time that Fauci’s remarks were exploited to spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. Science Feedback tackled claims that took Fauci’s public statements out of context in 2021 and 2022.
Like those previous occasions, the recent Facebook posts about Fauci’s experience with his third bout of COVID-19 mislead by taking his words out of context, thus misrepresenting what he actually said in both interviews.
The first excerpt is taken from a MSNBC interview of Fauci on 17 May 2021. In this interview, Fauci discussed a case pertaining to nine members of the Yankee baseball team who tested positive for COVID-19, even though eight had already been vaccinated.
Listening to the full interview leaves no doubt that Fauci acknowledged breakthrough infections—infections that occur in spite of vaccination—can happen. “You don’t like to see breakthrough [infections], but to me this is not something that is a shock to me at all,” Fauci said.
Fauci explained that breakthrough infections are usually mild and less contagious that infections of unvaccinated individuals:
“[Vaccinations] either protect you completely against infection, [or] if you do get infected the chances are that you’re gonna be without symptoms, and the chances are very likely that you will not be able to transmit it to other people.”
The full interview thus showed that Fauci was aware and open about the fact that COVID-19 vaccines don’t offer 100% protection against infection. He made clear that the benefits of vaccination were reducing disease severity and reducing the risk of contagion.
The second excerpt is from an interview from 10 August 2024 conducted by the medical news website MedPage Today about the publication of Fauci’s memoir On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service.
In this interview, Fauci explained that COVID-19 is less of a threat in 2024 than it was in previous years because the vast majority of people have at this point acquired some level of immunity against the virus, whether through infection, vaccination, or both.
Fauci then explained that he had COVID-19 for a third time, as mentioned in the excerpt. The part in which Fauci spoke of his third bout of COVID-19 is what the Facebook posts show. But they left out his remarks that followed, which showed that Fauci mentioned his experience to emphasize the importance and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination:
“It was a very, very mild infection. I’m 83 years old, I would think that if I were naive immunologically, this thing could have killed me, but it didn’t even make me significantly ill […] a little sniffles, a little sinusitis and a fever, and then it was over.”
Thus, listening to both interviews in their entirety paints a totally different picture from what the Facebook posts implied. Fauci didn’t change his views about the COVID-19 vaccines’ benefits between 2021 and 2024, nor did he contradict himself.
Available scientific data has repeatedly shown that COVID-19 vaccines don’t entirely protect against infection, but are effective against severe disease and lower the risk of contagion, as Science Feedback explained multiple times. In line with this evidence, Fauci acknowledged the existence of breakthrough infections and emphasized the effectiveness of the vaccines against contagion and severe disease in both the 2021 and 2024 interviews.
