Fauci Admits COVID-19 Vaccines ‘Don’t Protect Overly Well’ Against Infection

In an interview on Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor to the President conceded COVID-19 vaccines don’t protect overly well against infection.

“One of the things that’s clear from the data [is] that … vaccines — because of the high degree of transmissibility of this virus — don’t protect overly well, as it were, against infection,” Fauci told Fox News host Neil Cavuto.

Fauci later said vaccines protect “quite well against severe disease leading to hospitalization and death.”

“At my age [81], being vaccinated and boosted, even though it didn’t protect me against infection, I feel confident that it made a major role in protecting me from progressing to severe disease,” he said.

Fauci battled the virus for several weeks in June, took Pfizer’s Paxlovid, experienced rebound COVID-19, and took a second course of Paxlovid because it worked so great the first time.

Paxlovid, an antiviral made from a mixture of nirmatrelvir and ritonavir, in December 2021 was granted emergency use authorization to treat COVID-19.

“After I finished the five days of Paxlovid, I reverted to negative on an antigen test for three days in a row,” Fauci said in an interview during the Foreign Policy’s Global Health Forum.

“And then on the fourth day, just to be absolutely certain, I tested myself again. I reverted back to positive.”

“It was sort of what people are referring to as a Paxlovid rebound,” Fauci said. Over the next day, he began to feel “really poorly,” and “much worse than in the first go-around.”

Another study shows natural immunity superior to COVID-19 vaccines

Fauci’s appearance on Fox News comes days after a new study showed natural immunity to COVID-19 is substantially more superior compared to vaccines.

In a preprint on MedRx, researchers in Qatar found that individuals who acquired a COVID-19 infection and weren’t vaccinated had very high protection against severe or fatal disease.

“Effectiveness of primary infection against severe, critical, or fatal COVID-19 reinfection was 97.3% … irrespective of the variant of primary infection or reinfection, and with no evidence for waning. Similar results were found in sub-group analyses for those ≥50 years of age,” Dr. Laith Abu-Raddad of Weill Cornell Medicine said after studying long-term natural immunity in unvaccinated people.

Although researchers noted both natural and artificial immunity conferred through vaccination waned over time, those with a history of previous infection who were not vaccinated had half the risks of reinfection as compared to those that were vaccinated with two doses but not infected.

People who recovered from COVID-19 and weren’t vaccinated had very high protection against severe or fatal COVID-19, the study showed.