Dr. Fauci claims there is not enough time to wait for clinical trials before deploying updated COVID-19 mRNA booster injections into the arms of millions of people.
“We don’t have time to do a clinical trial because we need to get the vaccine out now,” Fauci said on CBC this week, per The Epoch Times.
The shots contain elements of the original COVID strain and the BA.4, and BA.5 variants of SARS-CoV-2. But no human data has been made available for the formulations.
Preclinical testing data from experiments on mice were presented by both of the pharmaceutical firms, and references were made to the human data for a different formulation, combinations of the original and BA.1 strains.
The director of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said on August 29 that waiting for data from human clinical trials would leave the boosters outdated.
“If we wait for those data to emerge in human data, not just mice data, we will be using what I would consider to be a potentially outdated vaccine,” Walensky said.
Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, Dr. Harvey Risch, was critical of Walensky and called Fauci’s comments “reckless,” saying that the CDC shows that variant BA.4.6, which is not part of the updated boosters, is becoming a more prevalent strain.
“By the time that a supposed new winter wave of infections would occur in late November or December, it will likely be BA.4.6 and the new booster will be outdated anyway,” Risch said.
Even if BA.5 continues to be the dominant strain, the duration of the new booster’s benefit likely won’t be much better than the current one, which just provides an increase in protection for several weeks, Risch argued, referencing a published study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
