Fauci To Vaccine-Hesitant NBA Stars: Scary Things You Hear "Are Untrue," "Not Factual"

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Although I do respect people’s individual rights to make their decisions, there is also a part of it, Hugh, that is what I refer to as societal responsibility. And although there are individual choices that people can make, when you’re dealing with a deadly pandemic, you’ve got to also understand your responsibility to the society within which you live. So I wouldn’t want to be pointing a finger at this young man, but I would hope to be able to get him to understand that by allowing the virus to infect you, even though as an individual you say I’ll take my own chances, I don’t care, I’m young, I’m healthy, the likelihood that I’m going to get a serious disease is low, which is true. You can’t deny that. But what happens is that when you do get infected, it’s very well likely that you might pass that infection on to someone who would suffer very terribly from that virus. So you don’t want to be a vehicle for the propagation of an outbreak that unequivocally has devastated society. That’s what I would appeal to, his feeling of…

HH: But Dr., he does more than that. Kyrie and some other NBA stars put stuff online that suggest that the vaccine is dangerous…

AF: Yeah.

HH: …that it could hurt you, that, so you need to speak to them directly. It’s not pleasant. What do you say to basketball stars?

AF: Well, you know, you tell them that it’s untrue. I mean, the fact is these are people, they’re not stupid people. And yet, they are somehow or other, been convinced of things that are just not factual, Hugh. I mean, you look at the data. The data are overwhelming that these are highly effective and safe. And if you look at the track record of vaccines in general, what they’ve done for society and the benefit/risk ratio overwhelmingly weighs in favor of the benefit. And it’s just factual. I mean, it’s, sometimes it’s inexplicable that people can look at data and just say it doesn’t exist. I mean, it does.

HH: Okay, it’s just factual.