Experts Now Say We May Never Reach Herd Immunity With COVID-19
Michael Cantrell
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When the coronavirus pandemic first started making its way across the United States over a year ago, many Americans added a new phrase to their vocabulary: herd immunity.
Herd immunity isn’t too difficult to understand. Essentially if enough people are infected with the virus or receive a vaccine against it, building up antibodies to the illness, the spread of the virus drops dramatically.
At the beginning, experts weren’t sure how many Americans would need to have these antibodies in order to reach herd immunity as they ranged from 50 percent up to 70 percent.
Dr. Anthony Fauci stated early on that the number was between 60 and 70 percent, but is now upping that number during a CNBC News interview to “75, 80, 85 percent.”
However, now experts are saying we might not ever really reach herd immunity.
But now, experts are saying we may never reach herd immunity. “Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers,” The New York Times reported on Monday.
“The virus is unlikely to go away,” Emory University evolutionary biologist Rustom Antia told the Times. “But we want to do all we can to check that it’s likely to become a mild infection.”
“We will not achieve herd immunity as a country or a state or even as a city until we have enough immunity in the population as a whole,” Lauren Ancel Meyers, the director of the Covid-19 Modeling Consortium at the University of Texas at Austin, told Times.
More than 31% of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — including nearly 70% of Americans older than 65. But according to the Times, some 30% of Americans are hesitant to get the vaccine.
The Times also went on to explain why the estimated percentage for Americans to reach herd immunity are continuing to go up.
“That is because the initial calculations were based on the contagiousness of the original version of the virus. The predominant variant now circulating in the United States, called B.1.1.7 and first identified in Britain, is about 60% more transmissible,” the paper stated. “As a result, experts now calculate the herd immunity threshold to be at least 80%. If even more contagious variants develop, or if scientists find that immunized people can still transmit the virus, the calculation will have to be revised upward again.”
You know, the media and the so-called “experts” on this have gotten so much stuff wrong that it’s hard to know whether or not you should believe anything they say.
Especially when so many Democrat governors are all desperately attempting to cling to the power they have stolen from the average citizen using this illness as justification. They’ll do anything to keep people scared and under their thumbs.
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