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Comment by prutschman | Hacker News Reader

How would you characterize the following statement by Dr. Fauci in terms of its transparency and honesty? I'm not asking whether "noble lies" are necessary, useful, appropriate, or a good or bad idea in the long run. I'm just asking about its transparency and honesty:

“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “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.”

-- source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...

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Talk about taking a quote out of context. Best to just read the whole article, but right after he also says.

“We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”

Herd immunity is also a moving target based on a lot of factors. Hopefully it doesn't reach measles level requirement.

So, the honest and direct answer at the outset would have been to state his actual belief: “70 - 90%, but we don’t know”

If you’re massaging your answers to questions based on what people want to hear, you better hope they don’t find out.

We know now based on people getting it twice and new variants that look to be easier to get that the herd immunity strategy would just lead to more misery.

Herd immunity is literally the point of mass vaccines.

He's talking about just letting the virus run free with no attempt to vaccinate, lock down, or wearing masks. This is what a lot of people now think of that as. Basically what will be will be, the human species has survived this long. Yeah herd immunity is not that but that's obviously what a lot of media has portrayed it as lately.

This is how leadership works when you're not a dictator. It's essentially a never-ending negotiation with a faceless and mercurial second party. Someone in his position cannot issue mandates backed by force, and so persuasion and influence are the primary tools -- and setting goals people see as unachievable is not productive. As the prevailing opinion changes, a leader needs to account for that. He's trying to achieve a specific result -- maximum acceptance of the tools we hav to fight the disease -- and the idea that a scientist can just stand in front of a camera and make a statement one time and then expect three hundred million people to accept that information and act with maximum rationality is basically absurd.

It's up to you to decide whether that makes him an asshole or not, but I think the fact that he's discussing it with reporters says a lot about his transparency and honesty all by itself.

> This is how leadership works when you're not a dictator. It's essentially a never-ending negotiation with a faceless and mercurial second party.

I’ve had leaders that misrepresented facts in order to obtain compliance, as Fauci has, and leaders that were honest with me. I know which I prefer and I know which is considered ethical.

What facts where misrepresented? He gave a range of numbers that seemed likely by him.

>> “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “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.”

He’s clearly saying he changed his statement based on the compliance of the population and not medical research. He misrepresented the medical consensus as to what percentage of the population would need to be vaccinated in order to achieve herd immunity.

A scientist's first commitment should be to evidence based truth. They should tell it how it is, then the leaders can figure out how to get there. If scientific papers came to a conclusion based on what people are willing to accept or what is popular, we'd rarely find anything surprising to advance science. Lying isn't science. Telling people to follow the science while your top scientist lies about what the science is-- that isn't healthy and it will make sure the average person starts to distrust the "science".

If he's willing to lie about that, what else is he lying about?

What exactly is he lying about here? He's shifting up with new science and as his opinion shifts.

"In the pandemic’s early days, Dr. Fauci tended to cite the same 60 to 70 percent estimate that most experts did. About a month ago, he began saying “70, 75 percent” in television interviews. And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said “75, 80, 85 percent” and “75 to 80-plus percent.”"

"In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks."

The problem Dr. Fauci and other scientist have is if they share their opinions and then evidence comes out that makes them change their opinions, they have people who will call them liars and pull quotes out of context. But, this is exactly how science works.

> the average person starts to distrust the "science"

Unfortunately the average person doesn't understand science and that is why they distrust it. I still see people citing papers relating SARS1 is killed by hydroxychlorqine in vitro, ignoring all the papers describing RCTs in vivo dealing with SARS2.

But the “truth” in science is consensus, which is hard for a virus that only has been out for a year. Some things can be said with a degree of confidence, others can not.

That isn’t to say he should be vigilant when he speaks to be accurate, but sometimes advisement needs to be done before all the data is there.

You're point is, to me, the most important. But in addition when you hear a number like 70-75% it's pretty clearly an estimate or guideline. It's not as though he was sitting there looking at the number 82.71, where 82.70 is wholly inadequate and 82.72 is overkill and saying 70-75, he was setting a goal and then realizing it could be set higher.

I would characterize your quote as selective, and this is just from the article (we don’t know the full story). He said it partially changed based on the science, and partially on political reality. I don’t know if that was the right thing or not for him to do. However, you’re omitting: “We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”

So it’s really an educated guess, and he took a lower estimate. People don’t do well with ranged and errors— just look at how stocks move based upon whether they beat or not their analyst estimates in quarterly reports… they almost always are within the range stipulated but people pick the middle value and hold everything to it.

None of this would cause me to characterize him as untrustworthy. We need far more Faucis in this world.

Yeah a lot of the same people who are trying to tear him down are the same who voted for and continue to support a President that has been easily counted to have 30,000+ completely untrue/outright deliberately false statements in the past 4 years.

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