- Guys he's like gonna jump on in like one minute.
- I know, he's almost here.
I have the participant window open,
and I get to allow him to enter.
- It's weird, I'm gonna be smiling,
'cause I'm just excited to see him.
- Some nervous energy.
- He's a busy man.
He's doing lots of world saving.
- We were 45 minutes early.
- Okay. Ready?
He's here, I'm admitting him right now.
Here we go.
(dramatic music)
(bell ringing)
- Hey, hey, hi guys, how you doing?
- [All] Hi, Dr. Fauci!
(upbeat music)
(light music)
- [Zach] On December 14th, the first vaccine for COVID-19
in the U.S. was administered,
beginning our nationwide rollout.
- Now there are a lot of questions
and misinformation out there, and today,
we are having the one person who can debunk
all of the conspiracy theories joining us.
- Although there's a lot of misinformation out there,
today, we're talking to Mr. Information.
- Today, we're speaking with Dr. Anthony Fauci,
a physician and immunologist.
I certainly have a crush on him.
(Zach laughs)
- He's the most important man of the last year.
- The Beyonce of medicine.
- Right?
- He is the Beyonce of medicine.
- [Narrator] Immunologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
- Dr. Fauci.
- There's nothing more important than him doing his job.
- I'm Dr. Anthony Fauci.
- My name is Dr. Tony Fauci.
- During the course of the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci
has been the physician most Americans have relied upon
for their information.
- [Narrator] Fauci graduated first in his class
at Cornell Medical College.
His career spans six presidents
and over 30 years of research.
- [Narrator] Not only did Dr. Fauci foresee
this kind of pandemic, scientists at the NIH
have spent years preparing for it.
- We're gonna use public health measures
to help us safely get to where we want to go.
- Hey. - Hi, Dr. Fauci.
- Hello. - Hi, everybody.
Hi, guys, how you doing?
- We're so good. - Wonderful.
- Doing well, thank you. - Good.
- We love you.
- So Dr. Fauci, this is the fastest vaccine
in human history.
People wanna know, did we undermine the safety
of the vaccine because it was done so fast
and without long-term studies?
- Okay, so that's a great question.
It's the most commonly asked question.
There was no cutting corners.
Safety was not compromised.
Scientific integrity was not compromised,
and I think people need to understand that the speed
was related completely to the breathtaking
scientific advances that had been made
over the previous 10 or more years,
where you can get the genetic sequence of the virus,
which then take that sequence and insert
the appropriate gene into these very new
and unbelievably efficient vaccine platforms,
and that didn't sacrifice any safety at all.
That was purely a technological advance.
Then the Moderna trial was 30,000 people.
The Pfizer trial was 44,000 people,
and it happened to be taking place in the middle
of a ferocious outbreak.
So when you're trying to prove a vaccine works,
and there are just a few infections
here and there in society,
it could take seven years to get a vaccine.
There was so many infections that we went from sequence
to getting the vaccine in people's arms in less than a year.
That is historic, but it's historic
from a scientific standpoint.
There was absolutely no cutting of corners at all.
- So you're saying that there's no chance
that there's some weird side effects that are gonna pop up
three years down the road?
- The chance of that happening is spectacularly low,
and let me tell you why.
If you look at the history of all vaccinology,
and you say when did these so-called
longer term effects occur?
The overwhelming majority, 90 plus percent of them occur
between 30 and 45 days after the vaccine trial ends.
That is the reason why the FDA said
that in order to make an emergency use authorization,
you had to wait 60 days from the time
50% of the people in the trial got their last dose.
So if you wait 60 days, you're already beyond
when essentially all of the long-term effects occur.
I've never seen one, where I get vaccinated in 1982,
and I get a toxic effect in 1986.
I mean, it just, I've never seen that happen
with any vaccine.
- Mm, mm-hmm.
- Wow, that's amazing.
Okay, I'm gonna ask you a question here.
Can I still infect someone else after I get the vaccine
and do I have to keep wearing a mask after I get it?
- The answer is yes, and I'll explain why.
It is still conceivable that you could get infected
and be asymptomatic, and even though the vaccine
protected you from getting sick,
it didn't protect you from getting infected.
So you may not even know that you're infected
and be completely asymptomatic,
and then spread it to somebody else.
- I think that's been the scariest part
of this whole pandemic, is that I could totally have it
and not know, and that terrifies me.
- We can pull back on masks when we get
such an overwhelming proportion
of the population is vaccinated
that there's herd immunity, which means that the level
of virus is so low that it's not a threat.
- What percentage of people need to get the vaccine
for us to achieve that?
- You know, we don't know the exact number,
but we can make a back of the envelope calculation
that it's somewhere between 70 and 85% of the population
needs to be vaccinated to get herd immunity.
- Here's, you know, some people, there's a lot of people
talking about things out there.
Some people think maybe it'd be easier
to just achieve herd immunity by letting the virus
spread rampantly through the population.
What do you think about that?
- Okay, well that's maybe the worst idea.
(both laughing)
- [Keith] Okay.
- I don't want to compare it to anything.
I don't want to insult anybody.
- It's not my question.
It's just a question that I have read,
and I'm relaying to you because you're the expert.
- Did you read it on Facebook, Keith?
- I did read it on Facebook. (Fauci laughs)
- The general level of herd immunity right now
in the country, the last time the CDC looked at it,
was like 10%, 12%.
Some cities like New York, it was 22%,
because New York got hit so badly in the beginning.
So let's say that the level in the country today,
let's say is 20%.
So with 20% of the people infected,
we've already had 352,000 deaths.
To get to 80, you'd have to have four times as many people.
So are you willing to accept 1.2 million deaths
in order to get to herd immunity?
I don't think so.
So the road to herd immunity is a vaccine,
not just letting people get infected.
- And how soon after getting the vaccine would I be immune?
- So let's say you get vaccinated, and then 21
to 28 days later, you get a boost,
anywhere from 10 to 14 days following the boost,
you can consider yourself protected.
- Dr. Fauci, a new COVID variant has been reported
in over 40 countries and is said to be more transmittable.
Will that make the vaccine irrelevant?
- That has a mutation, which is causing the virus
to be much more easily transmissible from person to person.
According to the Brits, who've looked at it very carefully,
and we will also be doing the same thing,
they find that the mutation does not make people sicker
or even more people dying, nor does it seem
to interfere with the protection
that's afforded by the vaccine.
So the only thing that's functionally different,
it appears to spread more easily.
- My fiancee, Maggie,
she actually got the vaccine already at work.
They've been prioritizing nurses.
For me, there's like a lot
of contrasting information out there.
Like I'm immunosuppressed, and I don't know,
am I supposed to get it?
- You can take a vaccine.
The only time an immunocompromised person
should not take a vaccine is when
it's a live attenuated vaccine,
because the virus can then replicate a lot in you,
and not stop replicating the way a person
who has a normal immune system would be.
But you should get vaccinated,
because even though the immune compromise
may not get you to have as robust a response,
a less than robust response is better than no response.
So go get vaccinated.
- Some protection is better than no protection, yes.
- I learned that in college.
(group laughing)
- Stop guys, stop, stop. (Keith laughs)
- I have a newborn child.
We just got his two months' vaccines
for all of the other stuff,
but I've been really worried about COVID.
When can my kids get the vaccine?
Do they need to get it?
- They do, but let me tell you what the strategy has been
for decades and decades and decades with vaccines.
Children and pregnant women are vulnerable.
So the general policy has been you do not vaccinate children
or pregnant women until you've proven that the vaccine
induces the same sort of response that it induces
in normal adults and protects them.
And you do what's called a bridge.
You bridge the immunogenicity study in the children
and the pregnant women with the efficacy study
that you've already completed,
and you make a determination
that it's okay to give it to children.
We're gonna start that likely towards the end of January,
we'll be doing that in children.
- Oh, that's soon.
- So Dr. Fauci, we know that the vaccine
doesn't instantly make everything better.
So what can you tell us
about what the next few months look like?
- By the time we get to April,
I think it would be open season.
Namely, anybody can get vaccinated.
There's no restrictions on it at all,
because all the priority people have been vaccinated.
If we then vaccinate at a very good rate,
President Biden has made the announcement
that he's gonna try and get 1 million doses a day,
so that a hundred million in the first hundred days.
If we do 1 million a day,
by the time we get to the end of the summer,
we will have reached that a percentage of herd immunity.
So that in the fall, if everybody gets vaccinated
that should get vaccinated,
we can start approaching a degree of normality.
That doesn't mean nobody wears a mask,
but that does mean kids can feel secure at school,
you can go to a sporting event,
you can go to a restaurant and have dinner,
you can go to the theater, things like that.
The critical issue is that we wanna really make sure
that this vaccine hesitancy that we see around
gets overcome by the truth,
that the vaccine is safe and it's efficacious,
and it will protect you, your family,
and ultimately all of society.
So go out there and beat the bushes.
Tell your friends to get vaccinated.
- Dr. Fauci, you've been interviewed by the best of the best
the world has to offer, but never by four idiots at once.
Next up, we have a lightning round.
Are you ready?
(dramatic music)
- [Announcer] Lightning Round
- These are some of the most widely believed
COVID vaccine conspiracy theories on the internet.
- Okay, Dr. Fauci, are you lying when you said
you got the vaccine?
- No. (laughs) Right here.
- [Announcer] Lightning Round.
- Does the COVID vaccine cause COVID?
- Absolutely impossible.
- [Announcer] Lightning Round.
- Are the vaccine ingredients more toxic
than COVID-19 itself?
- Absolutely not.
- [Announcer] Lightning Round.
- Will the vaccine change my DNA?
- Absolutely impossible.
- [Announcer] Lightning Round.
- Well, do the vaccines deliver a microchip barcode
into my arm to keep a track of me wherever I go?
- (chuckles) No, it doesn't. (both laugh)
- [Announcer] Lightning Round.
- And Dr. Fauci, one final question.
Will coupons that are redeemable
for one vaccine shot be called Faucers?
- (laughs) I hope not.
- Think about it. - That's a good idea.
You know?
You can run with that.
- Dr. Fauci, we wanna thank you so much for your time.
Is there any one last thing you would say to people
who do not want to get the vaccine?
- Yeah, I think they really need to examine carefully
in their mind the reasons for that.
If it's really based on a lot of people talking about hoaxes
and things like that, you really gotta take a look
at the risk that we're going through.
We're going through a real historic challenge,
the likes of which we haven't seen in 102 years
and all of this nonsense about fake news and hoax
and all that, I mean, that just results
in more people dying.
- We wanna thank you so much-
- Thank you so much. - For everything you do.
- Yes, it's been a real pleasure.
- [Ned] Go get vaccinated, everybody.
- You bet! Do it.
- [All] Bye, Dr. Fauci!
- I love you. Oh, he hung up.
- Guys, thanks so much for watching.
We hope you are taking this as seriously
as we need to take it.
When you can get vaccinated, you should get vaccinated.
There's gonna be some links in the description below
with more information and thanks again, Dr. Fauci.
What an amazing experience for us and for you.
We all basically got to hang out with him for a few minutes
and that's pretty awesome.
- Ned, you made him laugh.
- I know. (laughs) Whoa!
- I made him horrified. (Zach laughs)
(upbeat music)
- He didn't hear that I loved him.
- Well, he'll watch.
He watches all our videos, so he'll see it.
- Oh, okay, good, good.
- Yeah, he has, he's actually
a Sapphire Triceratops. (Zach laughs)