cnbc | EISEN: Dr. Fauci, you guys have been pushing the vaccine and I obviously understand why. I’m vaccinated but I also have COVID and it spread through my entire family in the past few weeks. That’s why I’m doing the show from home today and I just wonder about the public messaging around vaccinations. Three vaccinated people got COVID in my house, two unvaccinated children got it. Are you too casual about the limitations of the vaccine because it does feel to me that these breakthroughs are happening, they’re happening regularly, and we haven’t really seen the government pay that much attention to them or warn about them too much. The bottom line is we were still able to get it and transmit it. Thank god we’re not in the hospital, I get it, I’m vaccinated, but you can get it and transmit it and the government hasn’t been warning about that.
FAUCI: Oh yes I am, we have. And we’ve said that and let me just give you the science and the facts. If you are an unvaccinated person, you have five times the likelihood of getting infected, 11 times the likelihood of being hospitalized and 11 times the likelihood of dying, compared to someone who’s been vaccinated. So, the data showing the benefit of vaccines is incontrovertible. If you look at the people who have died from COVID-19, overwhelmingly 90 plus percent of them are unvaccinated. Vaccination protects you against severe disease and even when you get breakthrough infections because remember no vaccine is 100%, protected, but what we do know is that if you get vaccinated and get a breakthrough infection, you are much less likely of getting a severe outcome. It is much more likely that you in fact would either be without symptoms or be mildly symptomatic so you should not confuse the very important data that we now have a drug that can diminish hospitalization and death by 50%. You should not confuse that with the overwhelming benefits of the protection of vaccines. Those should not be confused.
"If you look at the people who have died from COVID-19, overwhelmingly 90% of them are unvaccinated," says Dr. Fauci. "If you get vaccinated and get a break through infection, you are much less likely of having a severe outcome and much more likely you would be without symptoms." pic.twitter.com/gEFsIjTNWj
— CNBC's Closing Bell (@CNBCClosingBell) October 1, 2021
EISEN: 100%. But it says on the CDC website, Dr. Fauci, that infections happen in only a small proportion of people who are fully vaccinated and when these infections occur among the vaccinated, they tend to be mild, but the CDC doesn’t even track the breakthrough infections. So how do we know that they’re happening to a small proportion and how do we know that they are tending to be mild? It’s not a question of whether hospitalizations and death, we know that benefit, it’s just public messaging and being transparent about the risk for vaccinated people.
FAUCI: Well, in the past, the CDC has not, you’re quite correct, tracked all real and potential asymptomatic infections. They are modifying that right now in the studies that are being done that would give the kind of information that you’re talking about. Also, it’s very important to know that with the booster rollout that we’ve been talking about, we are anticipating that we will get an extra added boost in the sense of clinical effect. The Israelis themselves are now showing very, very clearly, that when you give a person who’s received two doses of an mRNA in this case, Pfizer, when you give that person a boost, you dramatically diminish the infection, you dramatically diminish the likelihood of getting a severe outcome, and importantly, there are early data that are now showing that you actually begin to show a diminution in the transmission itself. So, in answer to your very appropriate question about if you get vaccinated and you get infected, is there less of a chance that you will be transmitting it to someone who is unvaccinated or someone who is vulnerable, the chances of doing that are diminished by being vaccinated and even further diminished, according to preliminary data we’ll wait to see the real fundamental core of the data, but it looks like that extra added of protection from a boost will be very valuable. Again, we’re talking about data that’s being rolled out in real time and that’s why when I’m using terminology that we’re having strong suggestions, we want to wait until we get a lot of data to be able to say that with a degree of confidence.
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