Fauci: No Vaccine Is 100 Percent Effective

FAUCI: "I don’t think they should be overly concerned. We’re going to keep an eye out on those breakthroughs to make sure that quantitatively the amount of breakthroughs is not any more than what we originally saw as the effective, or the efficacy of the vaccine. For example, we have very good data from the trials that the vaccines are highly efficacious, but as you said, and as I’ve emphasized multiple times, Wolf, no vaccine in history is 100 percent effective. So even if you get 90, 95, 90 percent, 75 percent effective, that means that what you’re going to see is there are going to be breakthroughs, and the more infections there are, the more breakthroughs you’re going to see. Yet, the percentage still remains within that framework of a highly efficacious vaccine. And so, although we — we never take lightly breakthroughs, we always investigate. You want to make sure that when you sequence the virus it’s not something new that we didn’t suspect before, but quantitatively it’s the denominator that counts.”