US could still have polio if media opposed vaccine: top scientist Anthony Fauci

Washington:

American scientist Anthony Fauci blasted commentators on Saturday for sounding an anti-vaccination theme, saying America could still fight smallpox and polio if the kind of misinformation today existed at the time.

Comments from the country’s leading infectious disease expert reflected growing frustration over the sharp slowdown in the Covid-19 vaccination rate in the United States, even as the disease has increased in low-rate states.

It also came days after President Joe Biden expressed his own visible frustration, claiming that social media that carries widely heard disinformation about vaccines “is killing people.”

Fauci was responding to a CNN interviewer who asked him if he thought “we could have beaten measles or eradicated polio if you had Fox News night after night warning people about these vaccine problems that are just rubbish ”.

Fauci said: “We would probably still have smallpox and we would probably still have polio… if we had the kind of false information that spreads.”

Initial vaccine skepticism in many areas has increasingly evolved into outright hostility, a message amplified by baseless conspiracy theories routinely aired on Fox and other conservative networks.

“Maybe it doesn’t work and they just don’t tell you,” Tucker Carlson, one of Fox’s most popular commentators, recently said.

Rather, the vaccines have been shown to be extraordinarily effective. Officials in Maryland, for example, said none of the people who died from the disease last month in the state had been vaccinated.

Of suggestions to send vaccine educators door-to-door to encourage people to get vaccinated, Fox commentator Charlie Hurt said, “They’ve become like the Taliban.”

Conservative politicians have increasingly echoed former President Donald Trump’s mockery over Covid precautions.

Door-to-door educators, North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn suggested, might instead come and pick up people’s guns – or their Bibles.

After a first wave of vaccinations across the country, the pace has slowed down sharply.

Biden’s stated goal of having 70 percent of adults vaccinated by July 4 fell short of about three points, and the vaccination rate has slowed further since then, even though the Delta variant of the disease has s ‘is spread rapidly.

A few Republicans have sought to blame the disease’s havoc and economic upheaval on the well-respected Fauci himself.

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced the so-called Fire Fauci law, calling for her salary to be reduced to zero and forcing the Senate to confirm a replacement. The bill should not go anywhere.

Fauci was asked on CNN about the T-shirts sold by a political action group linked to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis that said “Don’t Fauci my Florida”.

He looked genuinely puzzled.

“Take an individual who stands up for public health, the truth … and use my name in a derogatory way to prevent people from doing things that are in the best interests of their own health, go figure this one out.

“It doesn’t make sense at all,” he said, shaking his head.

(Except for the title, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)