Just a day after the FDA cleared the company’s COVID “vaccine” Fox Business reported Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said the company believes a COVID-19 vaccine-resistant variant will
likely one day emerge, though the company has a system in place to turn around a variant-specific jab within some three months.
"Every time that the variant appears in the world, our scientists are getting their hands around it," Bourla told FOX News’ America’s Newsroom cohosts. "They are researching to see if this variant can escape the protection of our vaccine. We haven’t identified any yet but we believe that it is likely that one day, one of them will emerge."
Mr. Bourla’s comments are particularly interesting in light of a study showing Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine is just 39% effective in Israel where the delta variant is the dominant strain, according to a new report from the country’s Health Ministry.
“We have to be mindful that, with time, the effectiveness of these vaccines may wane,” said Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease professor at the University of Toronto.
The solution?
Booster shots!
CNBC says the report out of Israel, which began vaccinating its population ahead of many other countries, is likely to bolster arguments from drugmakers that people will eventually need to get booster shots to protect against emerging variants.
Pfizer said earlier this month it is starting to see waning immunity from its two-dose vaccine, and now plans to seek authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for a booster dose. However, federal officials say fully vaccinated Americans do not need additional shots at this time.
This somewhat contradictory, but positive sounding news was swiftly shot down by none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci – who just days earlier had been touting the approval of the Pfizer vaccine as the key to ending the pandemic and its disastrous health, economic and quality of life effects.
"As we get into the spring [of 2022], we could start getting back to a degree of normality, namely reassuming the things that we were hoping we could do -- restaurants, theaters, that kind of thing," Fauci told CNN's Anderson Cooper.
In an analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN reported:
A pandemic that spans the early months of 2022 would make it even harder for Biden to keep up public morale and commitment to the kind of precautionary measures like masking -- a toxic political fault line -- that are needed to stem the further spread of the virus.
If the emergency does go on that long, it will offer an opening for Republicans who are seeking to brand Biden's presidency as a failure -- and who are seizing on his chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan to paint a broader narrative of political decay.
However, as the political implications of his comments sunk in, Fauci appeared on CNN and walked back his dire prediction -- just a little.
"I meant to say spring of 2022," Fauci told Cooper.
"If we can get through this winter and get really the majority -- overwhelming majority -- of the 90 million people who have not been vaccinated, vaccinated, I hope we can start to get some good control in the spring of 2022," Fauci said.
As usual, Fauci’s predictions have no basis in science, they are merely his opinions based on whatever criteria he assumes are convenient to the political agenda of Anthony Fauci.
With that in mind we think Fauci should stop naming COVID variants after the Greek alphabet and name them after elections, which is where his real interests lie. That means right now we’re in the California Recall Variant, next it will be the Midterm Variant, then the Keep the White House Democrat Variant, so we can forget delta, lambda, gamma, etc. and go with naming COVID variants after what really matters – politics.
COVID variants
delta variant
Anthony Fauci
vaccine passports
mask mandates
booster shots
Pfizer vaccine
Israel
FDA approval
BioNTech vaccine