“Who the f*** is he talking to on MSNBC?” a Twitter pal said to me when I posted this clip. MSNBC’s viewers are already sold on the vaccines. If Fauci wants to make a dent with holdouts, he should be on Fox.

That’s just it, though. I don’t think this is a sales pitch. It’s an “I give up” sigh of exasperation. He’s been on Fox many times to pitch the vaccines; he’s done plenty of interviews over the last few weeks warning the unvaccinated about the risk from B.1.617, the Delta variant from India. He must realize by now that many (most?) of the people who haven’t gotten their shots yet are unreachable, whether because they’re in a silo of misinformation about COVID and the vaccines or, as he says, because they have a spiteful “political objection” to being told what to do by the expert class. Either way, they’re going to take their chances with the variant that brought India to its knees. He’s speaking here out of frustration, not because he thinks doing so will make a difference but because he knows it won’t.

Although, to the extent that any Republican holdouts are still persuadable, he’s precisely the wrong man to do it. His image on the right is wrecked from his early reversal on masks, his support for lockdowns, and his agency’s role in indirectly funding bat research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. At this point, after the explosion of interest in the lab-leak theory, I’d guess a meaningful number of MAGA fans believe Fauci personally helped China genetically engineer SARS-CoV-2. If the feds have any hope of convincing Trumpers to get vaxxed, it starts with replacing him as the face of the national pro-vax effort.

But then that’s been true for months and Biden hasn’t done anything about it. Making sure Fauci gets his TV time is more important than convincing vaccine skeptics to take the plunge, apparently.

“Get over it. Get over this political statement. Just get over it and try to save the lives of yourself and your family,” says Dr. Fauci on the political polarization of the Covid vaccine. pic.twitter.com/9eqqCykBHN

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) July 8, 2021

He was responding here to a question about the theatrical outrage some Republican pols have aimed at Biden for wanting to send health officials door to door to maximize convenience for people who want to get vaccinated but haven’t made time yet. (“We’re not talking about the government knocking on your door. We’re talking about people who you can relate to in the community who you trust,” Fauci clarified elsewhere in this interview.) It’s impossible to believe that program would be as effective in moving the needle as employer mandates, making sure people can get a paid day off work to cope with side effects, and correcting common misimpressions, like the idea that mRNA vaccines emerged overnight or the belief that the vaccines contain the virus itself.

But every little bit of outreach helps and the feds are clearly worried enough about Delta that they think every little bit is necessary right now. I haven’t seen Fauci say it explicitly yet but the subtext of his nudges lately about vaccinated people avoiding crowds or masking up when in high-infection communities is that he fears that even the vaccinated are transmitting B.1.617 in some cases. The latest data from Israel shows Pfizer is excellent at preventing severe illness from Delta but not as strong at preventing infection by it as it was against the original virus. If more vaccinated people are destined to become mildly ill from the new strain, it stands to reason they’ll also end up infecting unvaccinated people more often than they used to.

To put that another way, if the vaccinated are vectors of transmission for Delta then the protection afforded to the unvaccinated by herd immunity will be weaker than we thought.

The jury is still out on how frequently vaccinated people are infecting others with B.1.617 but some scientists believe it must be happening:

As the CDC’s guidance is not to test vaccinated people unless they’re symptomatic, “we’re probably missing a bunch of transmission in vaccinated individuals,” [IHME director Christopher] Murray said…

“You cannot explain the explosive epidemic in Scotland, in a pretty highly vaccinated population, if they’re not playing a role in transmission,” Murray said of vaccinated people…

Murray says COVID-19 outbreaks are being investigated in US groups “that are 90%-plus vaccinated.”

“That could only be occurring if they’re transmitting amongst each other,” he said. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”

Currently the CDC says that vaccinated people don’t need to be tested routinely, a reflection of the belief that they rarely transmit the virus to others, but some scientists want to revisit that policy now that Delta has become the country’s dominant strain. And it’s anyone’s guess just how dominant it is: The latest numbers show that it’s responsible for around two-thirds of all new cases but those numbers are often a week or more out of date by the time they’re published. B.1.617 could represent an even higher share of new infections in reality, an amazing shift considering that it’s competing with another very contagious strain, the B.1.1.7 “British” variant. “I am a little surprised how quickly Delta has become widespread,” said Ashish Jha of Brown’s School of Public Health to Politico. “We’re one week into July and it is everywhere. It suggests that it is far, far more contagious than the Alpha variant. It makes me nervous … how contagious it is and how quickly it has spread.”

Hence Fauci’s exasperation. Tens of millions of adults have that freight train barreling down on them right now and they won’t step off the tracks, no matter how easy the feds try to make it for them. Oh well.