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A leftover from Friday. Vax skeptics are treating this as a bombshell admission to a conspiracy, to which I would simply say: Fox News daytime is an odd place for Debbie Birx to finally come clean about The Great Vaccine Deception.

But it is notable when a top White House expert cops to having “overplayed” any aspect of the federal response to a global pandemic.

Watch and pay attention to what she says immediately after the “overplayed” comment, since that seems to be getting overlooked.

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I knew the vaccines weren’t going to protect people from infection, she claims. Remember this golden moment from May 2021, which feels like it happened 20 years ago?

It was “masks off!” day in America at long last. Rochelle Walensky gave the green light on unmasking at that point because the data at the time showed that the vaccines were preventing transmission of the then-dominant variant, Alpha. If you had your shots, you could resume normal life. The president of the United States, still a popular figure, declared that Americans could get vaccinated or wear a mask until they did. It had become a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” So how did Birx “overplay” the vaccines?

What she means, I think, is that she and other experts like Fauci didn’t prepare the public for two likely eventualities. One is that immunity from the vaccines would wane. Some shots, like the smallpox vaccine, offer protection for a lifetime and many of us assumed protection from the COVID mRNA vaccines would work the same way. They did not.

The other probable development was that the virus would eventually mutate due to selection pressure as more of the population acquired immunity naturally or through vaccination. It didn’t take long last year, as Delta began spreading rampantly around two months after Walensky’s video. The current dominant variant, BA.5, has evolved to become the most immune-evasive strain to date, even reinfecting those who’ve had COVID before. Some older people are getting infected and dying despite having had two or three shots. Birx, Fauci, and the rest could have and should have anticipated that and shaped their message accordingly.

But they didn’t, and in short order came Delta and hundreds of thousands of deaths and then Omicron and hundreds of thousands more. Millions of vax skeptics looked at that, concluded that the vaccines were a bust, and decided not to bother — or at least not to bother with boosters if they’d already had two shots. If the federal public health brain trust had set expectations more realistically, that sense might have been less prevalent across the population. Maybe because they got swept up in the desperate hope that the vaccines really would turn out to be the magic bullet that would bring COVID to a standstill.

Or maybe this was another “noble lie” they all agreed to tell in hopes of influencing public behavior, like when they claimed early on that masks weren’t effective because they wanted to preserve the extant supply for doctors and nurses. Convincing the public that the vaccines would stop transmission cold was one way to encourage uptake. But a foolish way in hindsight, assuming that’s what happened, since it also assured public disillusionment once immunity began to wane and the virus began to mutate.

So, yeah, they overplayed the vaccines as a solution — to infection. But Birx says right there in the clip with Cavuto that the vaccines remain effective against severe illness and hospitalization, the most important metrics of efficacy. She still recommends going out and getting vaxxed if you haven’t yet. With good reason:

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CDC data found that the COVID case rate among the unvaccinated as of June was still three times higher than it is among the vaccinated while the death rate as of May was six times higher. Getting your shots won’t prevent you from catching COVID — that part was overplayed — but they’ll reduce your chances of ending up in the morgue, especially if you have risk factors. Biden’s new COVID czar, Ashish Jha, made the pitch again today:

As for Birx saying that the vaccines won’t help southerners in the midst of the current wave, that’s a matter of pure timing. The initial two doses and the first booster are given out over a span of months; the wave will be long over by the time a person who gets their first shot today can be fully vaccinated. But in the meantime Pfizer’s wonder drug, Paxlovid, does seem to be doing the trick for America’s geriatric bureaucrats. Anthony Fauci shook off a bout with COVID after taking the medication, and news is breaking today that America’s oldest man is nearly back to normal after being infected himself.

His symptoms have “almost completely resolved,” his doctor said in a letter today, with all vital signs looking good.

I’ll leave you with Fauci discussing one of his own big regrets of the pandemic, not warning people early enough after COVID’s emergence to take strict precautions against infection. Initially scientists thought that only symptomatic patients could transmit the virus, as is true with some diseases. Not this one.

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