When it came to COVID-19, we’ve been told for months to “trust the science,” and that anyone who disputed the “science” was risking people’s lives.
Yet last week Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious disease expert, admitted he fudged numbers on herd immunity to match public opinion polls.
And Sen. Marco Rubio is not happy.
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Fauci told The New York Times last week. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
In the interview, Fauci confessed that our scientific community really doesn’t “know what the real number is,” when it comes to herd immunity for coronavirus. Fauci pegged the “real range” at between 70 percent to 90 percent.
“But, he added, “I’m not going to say 90 percent” because that “might be discouraging to Americans.”
What often goes unremarked is that we don’t know how many Americans might have had the virus, and thus moved us closer to herd immunity, because they were asymptomatic and testing is done on demand, not randomly.
Fauci, of course, most famously flip-flopped on masks.
President Donald Trump called him out on that a couple of weeks before the election. After Fauci was on “60 Minutes” in mid-October, Trump tweeted that Fauci had said “no masks & let China in.”
Some in the anti-Trump media grudgingly admitted that Fauci early on had argued against widespread mask-wearing. He later said he did so in order to prevent a run on masks that could deprive hospital personnel of them.
On Sunday, following Fauci’s comments in the Times, Rubio, a Florida Republican, hammered him.
“Dr. Fauci lied about masks in March Dr. Fauci has been distorting the level of vaccination needed for herd immunity,” Rubio tweeted.
“It isn’t just him. Many in elite bubbles believe the American public doesn’t know ‘what’s good for them’ so they need to be tricked into “doing the right thing.”