They weren't sure about airborne transmission from a-symptomatic people at the time. Delta variant has a higher r0 than alpha, so the herd immunity numbers change. Saying he's purposefully lying because the facts on the ground change is ridiculous.
Yeah, but it's fair to say he's purposefully lying because he told us he was purposefully lying.
https://www.axios.com/fauci-goalposts-herd-immunity-c83c7500...
Here's the direct quote:
> When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... 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. We need to have some humility here .... 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."
Calling that "purposefully lying" is ridiculous. People who have to present a single number to summarize an entire body of scientific research for the general public always have to make a decision about how conservative of an estimate to give.
You expect those people to make their estimate based on the scientific research, not based on what he thinks the people are "ready to hear".
He literally said that the motivation for saying 80, 85 was the fact that a poll showing how many people had already been convinced to take it.
It's just a fact - he was selling the vaccine. I'm not alleging a conspiracy, or shady financial motives. I'm not saying the vaccine is bad, because I think it's amazing. But Fauci gave numerical estimates that he did not believe to be accurate, for PR reasons.
That's not what I read in the quote.
If he said 70-90%, then people may only hear 90 and think no way we'll get there. Sounds reasonable. If people hear we'll never get herd immunity due to delta and the potential for new variants, will more people get it or will it eliminate a reason for some to get it?
Keep in mind that if your estimate is too low many people will die or have significantly reduced life quality. And if your estimate is too high internet trolls will use that as fodder to discourage people from getting vaccinated.
There we go. He was giving aspirational targets, not scientific evaluations.
Sounds like he had a good reason to stretch the truth, but the fact remains.
It's not a good reason - this kind of manipulation is exactly why people distrust governments and "science".
You have not established any point where he lied or stretched the truth. What you have established is your personal axe to grind against Fauci.
It's good to examine why you feel the need to grind this axe.
We know why Fauci is controversial. He is controversial because the president wanted to let people die because he felt that is the truth about the pandemic came out he would lose power. Fauci told the truth and as a result was villainized by political extremists.
This alone explains, I don't know, like 99.9% of sentiment about Fauci.
So when you spend a lot of effort trying to convince people in the internet that he lied about something, but you're unable to produce any evidence, the perception is that you have some other reason for wanting to believe he lied.
So again I encourage you to think through what the ideal response would have been. Instead of trying to find any tiny reason to criticize him, actually think through what the right thing to do was.
EDIT: To make it even more clear, by the article you quoted, 100% of the numbers he gave were within the confidence interval. That is what it means to give a "scientific evaluation" as you say.
In other words, by your own admission he never told an untruth or a partial truth. He quoted the low end of the confidence interval saying "we likely need at least this many people assuming the vaccines are this effective etc". His gut feeling was that the numbers were higher, but he didn't have the evidence to say that, so the message we "we need at least this many people."
Then as we learned more he revised the estimates up closer to where he thought they should be initially, but which he didn't have evidence for.
Since he was telling the truth 100% of the time, it's difficult to make a case that he was lying or that he is untrustworthy.