Fauci Says The ‘Science’ He Has Been Pushing Is His “Guesstimate”

Dr. Anthony Fauci went on CNN's State of the Union show Sunday morning and defended his herd immunity projections as "guesstimates" after host Dana Bash pressed him on why he wasn't honest with Americans from the start and why the guesstimates were based on polling. Last week, Fauci told the New York Times that 90% of Americans would need to be infected or vaccinated before the country could achieve herd immunity.

That guesstimate was up from previous projections Fauci had made. “The calculations that I made 70, 75 percent, it’s a range. The range is going to be somewhere between 70 and 85 percent,” Fauci told Bash.

The New York Times quoted Fauci on December 24 as saying several different numbers to achieve herd immunity.

“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”

“We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”