Dr. Anthony Fauci responded to NBA stars spreading misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who asked the nation’s leading infectious diseases expert about “vaccine lies” coming from top athletes.

Ninety percent of NBA players have been vaccinated against Covid, but some have refused inoculation, including Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving, who has flirted with nutty conspiracy theories about the vaccines on social media.

“Kyrie Irving and other major stars in the NBA refused to get vaccinated,” Hewitt noted to Fauci, the chief Covid adviser to President Joe Biden, on his radio show. “They suggest there’s a lot of things wrong with the vaccine. Would you speak directly to Kyrie about the damage he is doing by spreading vaccine lies?”

“I think you have to put it into perspective of what is going on in the country with regard to Covid-19, the now, you know, inching close to 700,000 deaths with a vaccine that unequivocally from a scientific and public health standpoint has been shown to be highly effective and safe,” Fauci replied.

He continued by noting the “societal responsibility” of younger and healthier Americans to get vaccinated in order to protect the more vulnerable:

And 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.

Hewitt interjected to note that some NBA players like Irving “put stuff online that suggest that the vaccine is dangerous,” and implored Fauci to respond to them directly.

“Well, you know, you tell them that it’s untrue,” Fauci said. “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.”

“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.”

Listen above, via The Hugh Hewitt Podcast.

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