Dr. Anthony Fauci said the quiet part out loud last month — or more precisely, wrote it — when he and two National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases colleagues co-authored an article published by the prestigious Cell Host & Microbe.

In the article, the former director of NIAID and his colleagues declared that certain respiratory viruses such as Influenza A and SARS-CoV-2, among others, “have not to date been effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines.”

According to the authors, past “attempts to elicit solid protection against mucosal respiratory viruses and to control the deadly outbreaks and pandemics they cause” have been “unsuccessful.”

Regarding influenza vaccines, they wrote, it has been known for decades that “the rates of effectiveness of our best approved influenza vaccines would be inadequate for licensure for most other vaccine-preventable diseases.”

More specifically, they noted, the effectiveness of influenza vaccines “against clinically apparent infection” tends to range from 14% to 60% and be short-lived. They also highlighted that influenza vaccine formulations “are frequently not precisely matched to circulating virus strains.”

SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, they went on to state, exhibit “deficiencies” that are “reminiscent of influenza vaccines.”

“The vaccines for these two very different viruses,” the authors explained, “have common characteristics: they elicit incomplete and short-lived protection against evolving virus variants that escape population immunity.”

The reasons for this, they elaborated, are that the kinds of respiratory viruses against which vaccines tend to be most effective are those that have long incubation periods, spread systemically throughout a person’s body after replicating mucosally, and ultimately result in long-term, if not lifelong, immunity once cleared due to interactions with multiple components of a person’s immune system.

Measles, mumps, and rubella, the authors pointed out, are examples of diseases caused by respiratory viruses that share these features, which is why they can effectively be controlled with vaccines.

Conversely, they explained, influenza viruses and SAR-CoV-2 are non-systemic respiratory viruses with short incubation periods and largely replicate locally in mucosal tissue, thus limiting the extent to which they interact with their host’s immune system.

Coupled with the tendency of these viruses to mutate frequently, long-term immunity through natural infection is not attained, they wrote. Moreover, they acknowledged this makes developing vaccines, which is already a long and difficult process, even more difficult, and contributes to the available vaccines for these viruses being “suboptimal.”

Hence, the trio called for the development of vaccines for these viruses that are better than “suboptimal” prior to discussing possible approaches for achieving this goal.

Similar claims regarding the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines have been made by numerous other officials, scientists, and doctors in recent months, as well as over the course of the pandemic.

In an opinion piece for the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Paul Offit , a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, wrote that the immunity induced by the bivalent COVID boosters is short-lived and expressed support for ending policies that attempt to prevent all infections.

Earlier this month, several leading critics of COVID policy, collectively known as the Norfolk Group , enumerated multiple shortcomings of the COVID vaccines, along with harms inflicted by policies based on erroneous assumptions that the vaccines prevent infection and transmission.

Yet, for those hoping that America’s top suboptimal infectious disease bureaucrat and his NIAID colleagues would themselves call for changes in COVID vaccine policy, the wait will have to continue. Fauci and company, despite counting these vaccines among other “suboptimal” injections and “unsuccessful attempts” to stop infections and control pandemics, simultaneously claim victory, assuring that the jabs “saved innumerable lives and helped to achieve early partial pandemic control.”

Daniel Nuccio is a Ph.D. student in biology and a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute.