Controversial medic Dr. Anthony Fauci has claimed there’s no time to carry out vital safety trials on the latest COVID booster shots. He’s the latest government official to insist the new vaccines were good to go without going through clinical studies.
Talking to a Canadian news show last week, Fauci — who recently announced that he plans to quit as Chief Medical Adviser to the President — said that with 400 Americans still dying with COVID every day, “we don’t have time” to put new versions of the vaccines through clinical trials. These trials are an essential part of the approval process for any new drug and involve controlled testing on patients and careful monitoring for safety and effectiveness.
Pfizer and Moderna have recently developed new versions of their vaccines, optimized to work against the BA.5 strain of the virus, which is now the most common variant in the US. The problem is that the updated vaccines haven’t been tested on humans; instead, the pharma companies provided details of tests on mice. Fauci says the new vaccines need to be released immediately, and CDC director Rochelle Walensky has made similar claims, but prominent doctors disagree.
Dr. Harvey Risch, a former professor at the Yale School of Public Health, called the move “reckless,” and pointed out that Fauci had demanded clinical trials for the original vaccines at a time death rates were much higher. Dr. Vinay Prasad of the University of California, San Francisco said “we’re playing in a sandbox of unknown benefits and unknown risks because they don’t have clinical trials.”
