Mandating COVID-19 vaccination was a mistake because of ethical and other concerns, a top government doctor warned Dr. Anthony Fauci after Dr. Fauci promoted mass vaccination.
“Coercing or forcing people to take a vaccine can have negative consequences from a biological, sociological, psychological, economical, and ethical standpoint and is not worth the cost even if the vaccine is 100% safe,” Dr. Matthew Memoli, director of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases clinical studies unit at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told Dr. Fauci in an email.
“A more prudent approach that considers these issues would be to focus our efforts on those at high risk of severe disease and death, such as the elderly and obese, and do not push vaccination on the young and healthy any further.”
Employing that strategy would help prevent loss of public trust and political capital, Dr. Memoli said.
The email was sent on July 30, 2021, after Dr. Fauci, then the director of the NIAID, claimed that communities would be safer if more people received one of the COVID-19 vaccines and that mass vaccination would lead to the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re on a really good track now to really crush this outbreak, and the more people we get vaccinated, the more assuredness that we’re going to have that we’re going to be able to do that,” Dr. Fauci said on CNN the month prior.
Dr. Memoli, who has studied influenza vaccination for years, disagreed, telling Dr. Fauci that research in the field has indicated that yearly shots sometimes drive the evolution of influenza.
Vaccinating people who have not been infected with COVID-19, he said, could affect the evolution of the virus that causes COVID-19 in unexpected ways.
“At best what we are doing with mandated mass vaccination does nothing and the variants emerge evading immunity anyway as they would have without the vaccine,” Dr. Memoli wrote. “At worst it drives evolution of the virus in a way that is different from nature and possibly detrimental, prolonging the pandemic or causing more morbidity and mortality than it should.”
The vaccination strategy was flawed because it relied on a single antigen, introducing immunity that lasted for only a certain period of time, Dr. Memoli said. When the immunity weakened, the virus was given an opportunity to evolve.
Other Messages
Dr. Memoli sent the email to Dr. Fauci and two other top NIAID officials, Dr. Hugh Auchincloss and Dr. Clifford Lane. The message was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, though the publication did not publish the message. The Epoch Times obtained the email and 199 other pages of Dr. Memoli’s emails through a Freedom of Information Act request. There were no indications that Dr. Fauci ever responded to Dr. Memoli.Later in 2021, the NIAID’s parent agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and all other federal government agencies began requiring COVID-19 vaccination, under direction from President Joe Biden.
In other messages, Dr. Memoli said the mandates were unethical and that he was hopeful legal cases brought against the mandates would ultimately let people “make their own healthcare decisions.”
“I am certainly doing everything in my power to influence that,” he wrote on Nov. 2, 2021, to an unknown recipient. Dr. Memoli also disclosed that both he and his wife had applied for exemptions from the mandates imposed by the NIH and his wife’s employer. Her request had been granted, but his had not, Dr. Memoli said. It’s not clear if it ever was.
According to Dr. Memoli, officials had not gone over the bioethics of the mandates. He wrote to the NIH’s Department of Bioethics, pointing out that the protection from the vaccines waned over time, that the shots can cause serious health issues such as myocarditis, or heart inflammation, and that vaccinated people were just as likely to spread COVID-19 as unvaccinated people.
Dr. Memoli said he was “particularly interested in the bioethics of a mandate when the vaccine doesn’t have the ability to stop spread of the disease, which is the purpose of the mandate.”
“Vaccine mandates should be rare and considered only with a strong justification,” Dr. Memoli said. He suggested that the justification was not there for COVID-19 vaccines, given their fleeting effectiveness.
Julie Ledgerwood, another NIAID official who also spoke at the event, said that the vaccines were highly effective and that the side effects that had been detected were not significant. She did acknowledge that vaccinated people needed boosters after a period of time.
The NIH and many other government agencies removed their mandates in 2023 with the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency.
A request for comment from Dr. Fauci was not returned.
Dr. Memoli told The Epoch Times in an email he was “happy to answer any questions” but that he needed clearance from the NIAID’s media office. That office then refused to give clearance.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, said that Dr. Memoli showed bravery when he warned Dr. Fauci against mandates.
