Anthony Fauci criticises Donald Trump for using his words out of context
"Trump’s New Coronavirus Adviser Wants to Copy Sweden Approach"
Doctor says use of his comments to praise president in Republican campaign ad is misleading
Lauren Aratani in New York
Mon 12 Oct 2020 09.12 AEDT Last modified on Mon 12 Oct 2020 15.31 AEDT
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VIDEO - 1:25 - What Dr Fauci actually said versus how Trump used clip in campaign ad
Dr Anthony Fauci, the US’s top infectious disease expert, has criticised Donald Trump’s reelection campaign for using his words out of context to make it appear as if he was praising the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
“In my nearly five decades of public service, I have never publicly endorsed any political candidate,” Fauci said in a statement to CNN on Sunday .. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/11/politics/fauci-trump-campaign-ad-out-of-context/index.html . “The comments attributed to me without my permission in the [Republican] campaign ad were taken out of context from a broad statement I made months ago about the efforts of federal public health officials.”
In the video released on Saturday, Fauci can be heard saying “I can’t imagine that … anyone could be doing more” as the advert boasts of Trump’s response to Covid-19, which has claimed the lives of more than 214,000 Americans and infected more than 7.7m people.
The clip came from an interview Fauci gave to Fox News, in which he was describing the work that he and other members of the White House coronavirus task force undertook to respond to the virus, not Trump.
Aaron Rupar @atrupar Fauci has responded to this: “The comments attributed to me without my permission in the GOP campaign ad were taken out of context from a broad statement I made months ago.” (via @jaketapper) Aaron Rupar @atrupar Trump campaign ads are now featuring misleading quotes from Fauci making it seem as though he endorses the White House’s coronavirus response Embedded video 5:24 AM · Oct 12, 2020 7.2K Rupar tweet See the latest COVID-19 information on Twitter
A majority of Americans do not approve of the president’s handling of the crisis, according to several recent polls. The Trump campaign said it would not stop running the adverts.
“These are Dr Fauci’s own words,” said Trump’s communication director Tim Murtaugh. “The video is from a nationally broadcast television interview in which Dr Fauci was praising the work of the Trump administration.
“The words are accurate and directly from Dr Fauci’s mouth.”
For months during the course of the pandemic, Trump has often been at odds with Fauci, delivering contradictory public health messages and publicly expressing frustration with the doctor’s more sober take on the crisis.
As cases began to rise across many parts of the country, Trump encouraged states to quickly reopen their economies for the summer. Fauci at the time cautioned against reopening without appropriate social distancing measures in place, contradicting Trump’s messaging that states should not delay.
Fauci has largely remained a neutral, authoritative public health figure over the course of the pandemic, refusing to harshly criticise the administration’s approach, and opting to do dozens of virtual interviews to offer his recommendations to Americans. Trump has since replaced Fauci and Dr Deborah Birx, another respected public health expert who was once a regular at the White House press briefing, with Dr Scott Atlas, who is neither an epidemiologist nor an infectious disease expert.
Atlas, a regular on the Fox news network, has come under scrutiny by public health experts for questioning the effectiveness of masks and parroting the Trump administration’s optimistic timeline for a Covid-19 vaccine.
Trump's coronavirus chief urges Americans to gather for 'their last Thanksgiving'
Mark Sumner Daily Kos Staff 2020/11/17 · 07:48
For retired radiologist Scott Atlas, this is the best of times. For months, the federal government has not just done nothing, it’s done less than nothing to halt the advance of the pandemic that has so far killed more than a quarter of a million Americans. With Atlas helming Donald Trump’s “coronavirus task force” and everyone who knows even the slightest bit about infectious disease pushed to the sidelines, the task force has become a clearinghouse for misinformation and attacks on states still trying to show they give a damn about the lives of citizens.
Atlas has to be smiling as the number of daily COVID-19 cases rockets upward, even as Republican governors across the country continue to quiver in fear—not because thousands of people in their state will die, but because Trump might say something … unkind about the level of loyalty they’ve displayed to his policies. After all, Trump imposed a partial travel ban on China in February, don’t you know, and that solved everything. Now Atlas can smile as he fully engages in his dream of infecting hundreds of millions of Americans. Not only is he encouraging revolts against governors who make even limited rules to protect citizens, Atlas has some very special holiday advice: Families should hold big, festive thanksgivings, says Atlas, because “for many people this is their last Thanksgiving.” https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/11/16/1996110/-COVID-19-is-rising-in-Michigan-but-Trump-adviser-thinks-the-real-danger-is-in-public-health-efforts
Atlas, who has been pushing for America to reach “herd immunity” by infecting a large percentage of the population with the coronavirus, apparently didn’t get the note that he’s also supposed to say “while keeping the elderly safe.” Because he’s obviously wanting to make sure that every generation joins in the infection fun.
Don’t think of it as a holiday. Think of it as a culling of the weak. And pass the cranberries, please.
There are some Republican governors who are starting to realize that maybe following Trump’s less-than-nothing policy isn’t the best idea. Unfortunately, they’re achieving this revelation as the hospitals in their states overflow. And most are still mouthing phrases like “acting with caution” that should have been discarded nine months ago.
There’s little doubt that this Tuesday will bring 30,000 to 40,000 more cases of COVID-19 than the previous week. The new barriers that states are now rushing into place won’t have an impact on the raging national outbreak for at least another week, if not two.
Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who have tested positive for COVID-19 is all the way up to 3.4%. Meaning that the United States has made essentially no progress toward achieving herd immunity despite 11 million cases, 252,000 dead, and record levels of hospitalization pushing the healthcare system to the edge across the country. Herd immunity cannot be achieved, not without digging literally millions dead. And with at least two effective vaccines just months away, there’s no reason anyone should be pushing this idea at all.
This is the home stretch. The time when hunkering down should get the most … hunkery. And it’s definitely the time when every family should be skipping the big gathering.
When vaccines are widely available and families can gather with relative safety, we can all celebrate another Thanksgiving in March or April. In fact, a new national holiday to commemorate a new hope at the end of this international nightmare seems entirely appropriate.
A 'herd mentality' can’t stop the COVID-19 pandemic. Neither can a weak vaccine.
"Trump’s New Coronavirus Adviser Wants to Copy Sweden Approach "Trump’s allies back up his attacks on CDC chief "H.H.S. backs Trump reelection, blocks C.D.C. science expertise - C.D.C. Testing Guidance Was Published Against Scientists’ Objections [...] The Cost of Herd Immunity in the U.S. — Likely involves more than a million deaths; "That cannot be our price""
The history of herd immunity can explain why we need an effective vaccine to beat COVID-19. Above: Edward Jenner (1749-1823) performs his first vaccination against smallpox on James Phipps, a boy of eight, May 14, 1796, oil on canvas. Painting by Ernes Board, DEA Picture Library, Getty Images
Debates over herd immunity and natural infection arise with every outbreak. Effective vaccination always wins.
By Nsikan Akpan PUBLISHED October 2, 2020
Early disease fighters, such as Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, and William Farr, suspected if enough people were vaccinated, it could eradicate a disease. At the dawn of the 20th century, veterinarians more interested in livestock than people seized on the idea and coined the term “herd immunity.” By the 1920s, clever studies with hundreds of thousands of mice vaulted the idea into the mainstream, stirring optimism that making a fraction of a population immune could forestall a devastating outbreak.
But based on simple math, past experiences with outbreaks, and emerging evidence from the ongoing pandemic, this claim is a fantasy.
“If we had reached sufficient herd immunity in New York, you would expect incidents to continue going down, not to be holding steady,” says Virginia Pitzer, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health who specializes in the mathematical modeling of how diseases spread.
-- IMAGE A vaccine with 50-percent efficacy could spare hundreds of thousands from hospitalizations, chronic health issues, and death—but it couldn’t hit the herd immunity threshold on its own even if everyone took it. The safest bet is a vaccine above 75 percent efficacy.
NOTE: Each SEIR scenario includes 1,000 dots. Each dot equals 1,000 people. The model assumes an infection-fatality ratio of 0.75% and a basic reproduction number of 3.0. It also assumes that immunity develops after infection, so does not allow for reinfection, and that a vaccine is the sole intervention among the masses. SOURCE: PHICOR --
The reality is that most of the world—including 90 percent of the United States—remains susceptible to infection by the coronavirus virus, despite the global toll so far. Banking on natural infection to control the outbreak would lead to months, if not years, of a dismaying cycle in which cases subside and then surge. Even if such community-mediated protection were established, it would be constantly eroded by the birth of children and the real possibility that immunity in those previously infected would wane.
Only two infectious diseases have ever been eradicated: the human scourge of smallpox and the cattle-borne germ rinderpest. All other known afflictions—including such Old World pestilences as rabies, leprosy, and bubonic plague—have either been managed through human intervention or remain uncontrolled.
“It's very unlikely that we're going to see elimination of COVID-19 altogether from the population simply through the buildup of natural immunity,” says Pitzer. But if we add a highly effective vaccine on top of that, Pitzer says, “then it is theoretically possible that we could eliminate the virus” or at least control it.
“It doesn't mean that a vaccine that's below this certain threshold will not be useful,” says Bruce Y. Lee, professor and executive director of Public Health Computational and Operations Research (PHICOR) at the City University of New York School of Public Health. “But if you want to be in a situation where you don't have to do social distancing and these other things anymore, then the vaccine really needs to be over 80 percent efficacy.”
What we mean when we talk about herd immunity
Herd immunity’s prominence in fighting epidemics can trace its origins to the 1920s and the University of Manchester in England. Inside a lab there, about 15,000 mice per year scurried through what looked like moon bases in miniature. Intricate residential pods—each about a foot wide—were connected by cylindrical tunnels, allowing the rodents to move freely around the Lilliputian cities.
But occasionally, the mouse cities would experience epidemics—ones started intentionally by the project’s leaders, William Whiteman Carlton Topley and Graham Selby Wilson. Members of one city would be exposed to lethal bacteria, while those in a separate city would receive doses of a vaccine along with the dangerous germ. The duo’s findings—published in 1923 .. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2167341/ —demonstrated that immunity in a portion of a population could slow an outbreak and protect otherwise susceptible individuals.
Yet when most people discuss herd immunity today, they’re really talking about what’s known as the “herd threshold theorem.” It’s what scientists are referencing when they say 75 percent of the population needs to be immune against COVID-19 to stop disease transmission, and it’s surprisingly simple to calculate.
Say a germ lands in foreign world, where an entire population is susceptible. And say it becomes clear that one infected person will transmit it to four others on average—a value known as the germ’s basic reproduction number .. https://www.healthknowledge.org.uk/public-health-textbook/research-methods/1a-epidemiology/epidemic-theory , represented by an R with a subscript zero and thus called R-naught. To flatten the outbreak’s growth, you want a situation where the afflicted can infect just one person out of four.
“Well, that would be a circumstance where three out of the four were immune. He sneezed in four faces, but three of those individuals were immune,” Fine says. Three out of four is three-quarters, meaning a 75-percent threshold is needed to reach herd immunity.
Different viruses have their own reproduction numbers, so each has its own herd immunity threshold. Try the math again for measles, where one case can infect 18 susceptible people, and you get 94 percent. Polio has an R-naught of seven, so its threshold is 85 percent. These percentages serve as the targets for mass vaccination. Achieve them, and enough people in your community will be protected so that an outsider carrying the germ won’t be able to trigger a sustained outbreak.
As a 16-year-old volunteer firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service, William Foege learned a key principle that would ultimately save millions of people from the scourge of smallpox: “Separate the fuel from the flames, and the fire stops,” Foege writes in his memoir House on Fire .. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520274471/house-on-fire .
This mantra stuck with Foege after he joined the agency now known as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1962, and he was eventually stationed in Nigeria as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer.
Three years earlier, the United Nations, World Health Assembly .. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/88847 , and the WHO had launched a global eradication campaign against smallpox. The mass vaccination program quickly squelched the disease in Europe and North America .. https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html , but nearly a decade later, the disease remained endemic in much of Africa, Asia, and South America, with tens of thousands of cases still reported each year. The virus kept finding hideouts—both in rural areas and high-density cities where it could fester—and ultimately threaten disease-free areas given that the vaccine’s immunity only lasted five years.
The tide turned on December 4, 1966, when a missionary in the southeastern Nigerian region of Ogoja radioed Foege to warn of a new possible outbreak. Trekking 90 miles by motorbike, Foege and his smallpox unit confirmed four cases in one village—but immediately faced a dilemma. Standard protocol called for vaccinating everyone in all the villages within a certain radius, but the team didn’t have enough doses. They would need to improvise.
“If we were smallpox viruses bent on immortality, what would we do to extend our family tree?” Foege writes. “The answer of course was to find the nearest susceptible person in which to continue reproduction.”
They opted to track down and vaccinate the individuals most likely to come in contact with the known cases. Dubbed “ring vaccination” or “surveillance-containment,” this strategy helped clear the final strongholds of smallpox over the next eight years.
--- The philosophy of science is to break down the walls of ignorance.
The philosophy behind medicine is to use that truth for every individual patient.
The philosophy behind public health is to use that truth for everyone.
William Foege, former CDC director and distinguished professor emeritus, Emory University ---
It did it by addressing a wrinkle in the herd threshold theorem. That basic equation assumes everyone in a population is equally in contact with one another and spews an infectious virus in the same way.
This uneven risk of infection—or heterogeneity—creates hot and cool spots of viral spread. If a public health team can cut off the heavy transmitters, they can control an outbreak with fewer doses of a vaccine. That’s a huge advantage—especially when an epidemic nears elimination and mass vaccination becomes less cost effective.
“By removing the fuel one step ahead of the virus, we had built a fire line,” writes Foege, who went on to serve as CDC director in 1977, the same year smallpox was eradicated from Africa. He is now the co-chair of the panel behind the National Academies report and a distinguished professor emeritus of international health at Emory University in Atlanta.
“The philosophy of science is to break down the walls of ignorance,” Foege said at a October 2 news conference that unveiled the report. “The philosophy behind medicine is to use that truth for every individual patient, but the philosophy behind public health is to use that truth for everyone.”
But his revelation about fire lines also means fewer people overall need to become immune to tamp down on transmission—relative to what’s predicted by the theorem threshold and mass vaccination goals. Today, this idea has inadvertently propelled a misconception that a lower threshold can be achieved through natural infection to safely thwart COVID-19.
Stopping Pandemics: An exclusive National Geographic event with Dr. Fauci & other experts
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Our future with COVID-19 depends on us
On August 14, Tom Britton .. https://staff.math.su.se/tom.britton/ , a mathematician at Stockholm University in Sweden, and two other scientists released a model in Science .. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6505/846 .. that estimates how social activity might influence the herd immunity threshold. They started with the valid assumption that millennials and Gen Z mix more than older people, and so will more readily spread the virus. Britton’s team landed on a herd threshold of 43 percent—much lower than the 60 to 75 percent you get using the classic equation.
“We don't claim that the number from our model applies in reality,” Britton cautions, adding that the model merely shows the degree to which disease-induced immunity can play a role. “We don't want our paper to have the consequence that people feel relaxed and say, Let's skip restrictions and wait for herd immunity.”
Another limitation of heterogeneity modeling, Columbia University’s Shaman says, is that no one really knows how germs spread among people on the street, so it’s difficult to tell what these reduced thresholds mean for real life.
“[Heterogeneity] is also constantly changing through time because of the measures we put in place. The telecommuting, the closing of schools, the wearing of masks are disrupting all the normal interactions that the virus feeds off,” Shaman says. “That completely changes the landscape.”
Moreover, recent studies of explosive COVID-19 outbreaks in two different regions suggest the classic herd theorem might be valid. In Qatar, the herd immunity threshold appears to have been achieved in about 10 working-class communities.
“So 60 percent of the population of Qatar is migrant workers. Almost all men and South Asian,” says Shaman. “They live in dormitory-style housing. They eat in cafeteria-style settings. They're just about as homogenized, in the sense of their interactions, as you could possibly get.”
If the latter, the virus will bounce back even if places reach the herd immunity threshold through natural routes. This vulnerability would be reinforced by children, who are born without immune defenses and thus are susceptible to catching and spreading the disease. Another concern for waning immunity would be frequent reinfections that result in severe symptoms, Shaman says.
“This would suggest we're not going to be done with this any time soon, and that prior exposure doesn't lessen your chance of winding up in the hospital,” he says. Though one severe reinfection .. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02506-y .. has been reported worldwide, there’s no evidence yet this is happening on a broad scale.
If society wants to overcome these bleak possibilities and return to life without social distancing and mask wearing, it needs a vaccine that provides a sufficient amount of what’s known as sterilizing immunity, meaning the drug blocks coronavirus transmission.
--- " Current guidance says vaccine frontrunners can be approved even if they only provide “functional immunity,” which mainly confers protection against the symptoms of the disease. ---
“I would say the sweet spot is 80 percent,” says CUNY’s Lee, who co-authored a research paper in July .. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7361120/ .. about efficacy goals for the COVID-19 vaccine. The bare minimum standard of 50 percent, set by the FDA and WHO, would only protect half the population if everyone is vaccinated. That falls well below the theorem threshold for COVID-19 of 60 to 75 percent. Such a scenario would be akin to the seasonal influenza vaccine, for which transmission efficacy tends to range between 20 to 60 percent. Mass vaccination doesn’t stop the flu, though it does reduce the disease burden on society.
“We have to make it clear to everyone that the first vaccine to reach the market may not achieve those efficacy levels,” Lee says. “It's not that easy to get an efficacy that high for a respiratory virus.”
That’s because current guidance says vaccine frontrunners can be approved even if they only provide “functional immunity,” which mainly confers protection against the symptoms of the disease.
The ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials are not designed to estimate the impact the vaccine candidates would have on transmission, write the authors of the National Academy of Medicine report, adding that we may not learn this impact until well after an FDA approval. As they explain, the first priority is to stop the most vulnerable people from dying, especially older people with pre-existing conditions and our limited cohort of frontline health-care specialists and first responders.
“So much of the focus has been on the return to normal,” Lee says, “and we can't have that type of expectation.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect that polio, not the mumps, has an R-naught of seven and herd immunity threshold of 85 percent.
Sweden’s low COVID-19 death tally in July ignores other markers of pandemic’s toll
"Trump’s New Coronavirus Adviser Wants to Copy Sweden Approach "Trump’s allies back up his attacks on CDC chief"
Steve Deace stated on August 2, 2021 in a Facebook post: Sweden had few COVID deaths in July, despite low vaccination rates, relaxed lockdown rules and low mask compliance.
Public Health Facebook Fact-checks Coronavirus Steve Deace
From the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Sweden made itself a compelling case study, forgoing lockdowns and mandates, keeping its society largely open — and prompting claims that it was faring better with COVID-19 than the United States.
Alluding to the 27-nation European Union, which includes Sweden, Deace wrote:
"In the month of July, Sweden recorded a grand total of 9 deaths with Covid in a nation of over 10 million. Lowest mask compliance in EU, least locked down country in EU from beginning, and just 41% fully vaccinated. Also codes Covid deaths similar to how we do."
The post has a point in terms of its characterization of Sweden’s response to the pandemic, its vaccination rate and a relatively small number of COVID-19 deaths in July.
But cherry picking one statistic — the raw number of deaths in a single month — leaves a misleading impression of conditions and trends in Sweden.
Asked whether he was implying that there is a connection between the July deaths and Sweden’s low vaccination rates, relaxed lockdown rules and low mask compliance, Deace told us: "I actually trust readers to draw their own conclusions from the data."
The post looks at deaths only for July 2021. But Sweden has seen wide variations in its COVID-19 caseloads and death toll since last year.
By April 2021, there were signs that Sweden’s approach had flaws. At that point, the New Yorker reported .. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/swedens-pandemic-experiment , Sweden’s per-capita case counts and death rates were many times higher than any of its Nordic neighbors, all of which imposed lockdowns, travel bans and limited gatherings early on.
The latest figures show Sweden’s COVID-19 death rate is lower than in the European Union and the U.S. — but it has more than doubled in the past 10 months.
Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s top epidemiologist, told PolitiFact that the death rate has risen in many countries. "We have had two severe waves. The excess mortality is comparably low," he said.
Deace claims that Sweden had few COVID deaths in July, despite low vaccination rates, relaxed lockdown rules and low mask compliance.
Sweden has imposed fewer restrictions than other countries and had few deaths in July, but its COVID-19 death rate has been above the U.S. and the EU at various times during the pandemic. Sweden has had more COVID-19 deaths per capita than its neighbors, and infections are rising.
The post cherry-picks data from a single month, and leaves out substantial context about Sweden’s COVID-19 experience since the pandemic began.
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