Nicole Saphier, MD is a physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College and bestselling author of 'Panic Attack.' Her opinions are her own and not reflective of her employers.
Who knew that one of the symptoms of COVID was whiplash?
On Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci declared that the pandemic that has killed nearly 1 million people in the United States and more than 6 million people worldwide is apparently over.
'We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase,' he said at the tail end of a PBS NewsHour interview on Tuesday evening.
Then less than 24 hours later, Fauci was scrambling to walk that statement back.
'The world is still in a pandemic,' Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Washington Post on Wednesday, 'There's no doubt about that. Don't anybody get any misinterpretation of that. We are still experiencing a pandemic.'
'We're really in a transitional phase,' he went on, 'from a deceleration of the [COVID case] numbers into hopefully a more controlled phase and endemicity.'
The White House also quickly backtracked Fauci's declaration in a news conference saying, 'While cases are low, cases are still driven by transmissible BA.2 variant. No question we are in a different moment. We know the pandemic isn't over. '
If you're confused by all of this, I don't blame you, because Fauci and the White House are largely playing a game of semantics.
A pandemic describes a situation in which a disease spreads uncontrollably across continents, overwhelming health care systems, causing rapid increases in cases and deaths.
An endemic defines a scenario in which a disease has been normalized in a region through immunity, treatments and access to testing.
The reality is that SARS-Cov-2 is still a pandemic in some parts of the world, but in the US, it is endemic and it has been for some time given the high level of circulating immunity.
Fauci's remark on PBS isn't being misinterpreted as he may have you believe. It was a gaffe in the truest sense of the word – he told the truth, by accident.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced this week that because so many people in the U.S. have now caught Omicron and other variants of the coronavirus, nearly 60% of the population — and almost 75% of children 11 and younger — have natural immunity.
Expected seasonal rise and falls of new cases should not define a continued state of emergency.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced this week that because so many people in the U.S. have now caught Omicron and other variants of the coronavirus, nearly 60% of the population — and almost 75% of children 11 and younger — have natural immunity.
Public health officials have irresponsibly dismissed the value of protection from natural immunity in their unilateral push for vaccination, but real-world experience and 100+ research studies disagree.
Last summer the SIREN study was published which looked at over 30,000 health care workers and showed immunity in those who has previously been infected had protection from reinfection for over 8 months. The data also showed those with hybrid immunity, meaning vaccinated and infected had last immunity over 15 months.
A study from Johns Hopkins Medicine in early 2022, one of the largest studies of natural immunity, also showed antibody levels against SARS-CoV-2 remain higher over an extended period of time in those with hybrid immunity compared with those who only got immunized.
Even before the highly contagious Omicron and BA.2 waves, a survey put out by the CDC estimated over 80% of Americans 16 and older had some level of immunity through vaccination, infection or a combination of both.
Now, that number has likely reached over 95% of the entire U.S. population.
International seroprevalence surveys, which track the level of COVID-fighting antibodies due to vaccines and/or prior infection, show by the end of 2021, about 80% of
