Fauci Misled Trump on COVID-19 Vaccines: What the Trial Data Really Shows, By Mrs. (Dr) Abigail Knight (Florida)
In 2020, the Trump administration rolled out Operation Warp Speed, delivering COVID-19 vaccines at breakneck speed. President Donald Trump hailed the effort as a historic success, demanding pharmaceutical companies prove the efficacy of their vaccines. But behind the headlines, the data told a much different story, one that public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, conveniently downplayed.
Independent analyses, including Dr Ron Brown, published in Medicina in February 2021, show that the vaccines' absolute risk reductions, the real-world benefit to an individual, were roughly 1%. In other words, the vaccines offered minimal protection against infection. Yet Fauci and other officials loudly touted relative risk reductions of around 95%, giving the impression of near-total protection. The public, including the President, was misled. The issue is a bit complicated, so I will not go into the precise definitions here, but merely note that there are two criteria, and Dr Fauci and the medical establishment went for the one that suited their agenda.
The difference between absolute and relative risk is critical. Relative risk reduction can look impressive in percentages, but it does not reflect the actual likelihood of being protected. The FDA's own 2011 guidance clearly states that both absolute and relative risk reductions should be disclosed to the public. During Operation Warp Speed, these rules were ignored, leaving Americans with an inflated sense of the vaccines' effectiveness.
When later observational studies and CDC announcements revealed that mRNA vaccines were not stopping viral spread as expected, the discrepancy became painfully clear. Trump, relying on public health messaging, was operating under assumptions that the evidence did not support. The situation illustrates a broader problem: public health officials adopted messaging over transparency, promoting an optimistic narrative at the expense of truth.
This pattern repeated with COVID-19 antivirals. Subsequent analyses by Dr Brown showed that absolute risk reductions for most of these drugs were also far lower than public messaging suggested. Across the board, selective reporting of data misled policymakers and the public alike.
The lesson is stark: scientific data must be communicated honestly. Inflated efficacy claims may support policy goals temporarily, but they erode trust and distort decision-making. In this case, the Trump administration's reliance on selective reporting by Fauci and others demonstrates how even well-intentioned public health messaging can mislead the highest levels of government, and the public they serve, producing disastrous results.
"By Ron Brown, Ph.D.
U.S. President Donald Trump recently demanded the release of data from pharmaceutical companies to "justify the success of their various COVID-19 drugs," which include the COVID-19 vaccines that his administration delivered to the public in 2020 through Operation Warp Speed.
Unfortunately, data from randomized controlled trials prove the opposite of success — the COVID-19 vaccines failed to reach clinically significant efficacy against infection with the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.
Furthermore, evidence suggests that the President was misled by public health officials who failed to fully disclose the very low absolute efficacy of the vaccines.
Absolute and relative risk reductions
After the launch of Operation Warp Speed, I conducted an independent analysis of COVID-19 vaccine efficacy from data published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
My analysis, which was published in Medicina in February 2021, showed that the absolute risk reductions of the Stage 3 clinical trials for the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were clinically insignificant at approximately 1%. Similar findings were verified by other researchers.
In the meantime, the public was told by public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, that the vaccines were around 95% effective in reducing the risk of a mild to moderate COVID-19 infection. The vaccines were lauded as the most effective tool to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
Observational studies also claimed that COVID-19 antiviral drugs were effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths.
Nevertheless, evidence of "effectiveness" from these observational studies could not control for biases and confounding factors, nor rise to the gold standard of efficacy experimentally verified through participant randomization in clinical trials.
Many months later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were not effective in stopping the spread of the coronavirus. What went wrong? Clearly, the expectations of high vaccine efficacy did not match my 2021 analysis. Who was right?
The answer is that both the public health officials and I were right, except that we each analyzed and reported different findings from the trial data. While I reported the vaccines' absolute risk reductions, Fauci and public health officials reported the vaccines' relative risk reductions.
Understanding the difference between these two risk measurements is crucial for correctly interpreting the efficacy of the vaccines.
Failure to communicate risks
Without getting into a complicated explanation of statistical differences between absolute and relative risk reductions … the important point is that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stated in their 2011 publication, "Communicating Risks and Benefits: An Evidence-Based User's Guide," that BOTH absolute and relative risk reductions should be disclosed to the public.
Obviously, this did not occur during Operation Warp Speed. Indeed, members of the FDA committee that granted emergency use authorization of the vaccines ignored the FDA's own guidelines for communicating risks to the public and omitted reporting the absolute risk reductions.
Public health officials falsely declared the much higher relative risk reductions as the true risk reductions of the vaccines. Apparently, pressure to support the vaccines as a quick way out of the COVID-19 pandemic promoted public health policy over valid and reliable scientific data.
Had the public been aware of the low clinical efficacy of the vaccines in absolute terms, the expectations of the vaccines to stop the spread of the coronavirus would not have been overstated, and the public, including the Trump administration, would not have been misled.
After publishing my findings on the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, I later analyzed data from trials of COVID-19 antivirals and found similar problems of unreported low absolute risk reductions associated with most of these drugs: "Absolute Risk Reductions in COVID-19 Antiviral Medication Clinical Trials."
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