This just in: The always-reliable Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is inexplicably still the White House’s chief medical adviser, has conceded that those COVID-19 vaccines — the ones that he and Joe Biden have been using like a cudgel against the American people — aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

Here’s how Fauci put it: “One of the things that’s clear from the data [is] that even though vaccines — because of the high degree of transmissibility of this virus — don’t protect overly well, as it were, against infection, they protect quite well against severe disease leading to hospitalization and death.”

As it were. Against infection. Now he tells us.

Fox News’s Laura Ingraham and her guest last night, Yale University Professor of Epidemiology Harvey Risch, could hardly contain themselves. Here’s a key passage:

Ingraham: Okay, he was two times boosted — or three times, we’ve lost track — he got COVID, he took the Paxlovid [antiviral], then he got a rebound of COVID during the Paxlovid. But his message is, ‘Everybody go out and get boosted,’ when the booster doesn’t even apply to the new variant. Am I missing something here?

Risch: No, I think that Dr. Fauci is missing something. When something doesn’t work, doing more of it doesn’t make it work better. It makes it work worse. And that’s what they’re recommending. In fact, we know now that the polyvaccinated — people who have multiple boosters — have higher risk of getting the virus and spreading the virus than unvaccinated people. The British data clearly show that, and other data around the world are showing that. … The mortality is now almost entirely in highly vaccinated people. And so, we don’t want to be doing this anymore. We want to start living life knowing that we have an endemic infection and not a pandemic infection, and that’s a huge difference. We’re never going to get to zero COVID. We don’t expect to. Dr. Fauci thinks we [are], and maybe the Chinese do, but we don’t, and we know the reality is that we’re not going to, and we manage it.

Ingraham: And natural immunity protects for the longest period of time … which is what we should all be celebrating.

Imagine that. The people who, for whatever reason, chose not to get the vaccine and instead contracted the virus, got through it, and in so doing built up their body’s own natural immunity are now the most highly resistant to getting COVID or dying from it.

(There’s one caveat: The elderly or those with comorbidities are more likely to be vaccinated, but also still more at risk of COVID. This could skew the statistics.)

The interview ended before Dr. Risch could confirm Ingraham’s final point about the fundamental superiority of natural immunity, but he didn’t need to. He nodded his approval, and the point has already been made resoundingly by more than 200 (and counting) independent studies, including this one, published on June 9 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

And yet Dr. Fauci and his fellow Big Pharma toadies are still beating the drum for shots and boosters, and our CDC and the Biden administration are still taking orders from Pfizer and Moderna and the rest of Big Pharma, as they try to con us into believing that our toddlers and children need to be vaccinated despite being at almost no risk of serious COVID complications.

Is it any wonder that an investigation by a nonprofit watchdog group called Open the Books found “hundreds of millions of dollars in … royalty payments from third-party payers (think pharmaceutical companies) back to the [National Institutes of Health] and individual NIH scientists”?

What a conflict of interest it’d be if some of these millions came from drug companies involved in COVID-19 vaccinations.

Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins reports that this latest COVID variant, BA.5, is causing a bump in cases of “a mild common-cold-like illness … but we’re watching the preview of BA.5 in Europe and it does appear to be passing, and it also is not resulting in hospitalizations that are meaningful.”

All of this leads us to wonder about a 24,000-strong contingent of our military personnel who aren’t interested in getting the vaccine and who now risk being kicked out of the Armed Forces. “The argument that they should be vaccinated to increase readiness,” says Makary, “is an argument that you would have to carry through with getting them vaccinated every three months for their entire military career. That’s not reasonable. What we’ve seen now are 200 solid studies showing that natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity. The vast majority of these people threatened to be fired have natural immunity … and so it’s really tragic. … It is overwhelming. Any scientist who has not washed their objectivity for political allegiance has to recognize it.”

You’re telling us. These are among the best and brightest and most patriotic of our warriors. To shove them out of service for such dubious reasons, and at a time when our military’s recruiting numbers are so woefully short of where they need to be, is practically criminal.

So much for these vaccine-mandating tyrants in both the White House and the Pentagon. And so much for following the science.

UPDATE: We at The Patriot Post have always believed that getting vaccinated against COVID-19 should be a personal choice — a choice to be considered carefully and exercised freely by individual American citizens, not forced upon them by government bureaucrats. For additional information, visit our comprehensive COVID-19 resource page.