By Thomas Catenacci
A growing consensus of experts no longer believe the U.S. will ever reach herd immunity and instead project that coronavirus will be around for the foreseeable future.
Public health experts expect that while the virus will not disappear from the U.S., it will become more manageable and will severely affect less people, according to The New York Times. With high vaccination rates for the elderly and most vulnerable populations, the experts believe Americans can return to normalcy soon even if herd immunity is never reached.
“The virus is unlikely to go away,” Rustom Antia, a biologist at Emory University, told the NYT. “But we want to do all we can to check that it’s likely to become a mild infection.”
The federal government stopped referring to herd immunity as a goal in previous months because reducing infections was possible without reaching that high bar, according to Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, the NYT reported.
“People were getting confused and thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is,” Fauci said, according to the NYT. “That’s why we stopped using herd immunity in the classic sense. I’m saying: Forget that for a second. You vaccinate enough people, the infections are going to go down.”
To reach herd immunity, more than 80% of the U.S. population would need to be vaccinated or have natural immunity to the virus, according to the NYT. A person gets natural immunity after contracting the virus and gets the antibodies necessary to fight off future infection.
Nearly 250 million vaccines have been administered and 44% of the U.S. population has received at least one dose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some projections estimate that more than 20% of the population has had coronavirus, but the actual number is unknown.
However, vaccination rates have started to significantly slow down as demand has fallen, according to the NYT.
Much of the trouble with reaching herd immunity is that it requires all localities to reach herd immunity on their own, according to the NYT. Although some neighborhoods may have a lower threshold since they are spread out, more crowded areas will have a higher threshold.
“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, director of the Covid-19 Modeling Consortium at the University of Texas at Austin, told the NYT.
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities for this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
It won’t go away until people decide to stop being afraid of it.
Who says the human body cannot develope immunity on it’s own ????
The 1917 influenza ended and went away – a sad time, but Over.
Deny evolution? Why has polio been defeated, not everybody got inoculations.
If I every had virus, I didn’t recognize it! So was I exposed and developed a strong lifetime immunity?
The only herd immunity is not becoming part of the herd!
The virus is weakening and it appears to be running its course. the 80% number is maybe too excessive, here’s why;
The American Red Cross put out a statement that 20% of the recent blood donations show COVID 19 antibodies from non-vaccinated persons, whereas the number of COVID cases (by testing) show about 10% of the US population, according to CDC stats. If the Red Cross number is more accurate, assuming many people have had it but were not tested, then about 70 million people have been infected and recovered, and as of today 105 million have received the vaccines. That’s a little more than 50% of the US. Plus, children should not be vaccinated for this.
This is really upsetting to me. I. The 50’s and 60’s we had polio, measures and mumps, pertussis and other infections that vaccines were developed to combat. Governments required school kids to be vaccinated and towns actually quarantined families (required the whole family to be confined to their home) for measles and mumps infections. I know because in the early 1950’s my whole family was quarantined by the town doctor for two weeks. My father couldn’t work and relatives dropped off food at our front door! We didn’t think it was political! We didn’t think it was a constitutional Right intrusion. My whole family and others felt that it was socially responsible! AND IT WAS!
So now the whole idea of vaccinations becomes political with an aura of government ‘control’!
Anyone with a smidgen of history would understand that eradication of this pandemic requires many measures, vaccinations being in the forefront!
TREATMENT should be at the forefront. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are now proven highly effective in hundreds of peer-reviewed studies–yet it is never discussed. Nor is the importance of building healthy a immune system, despite reports that the majority of Covid victims are Vitamin D deficient. It is always about vaccine, vaccine, vaccine. Of course it is: Big Pharma provides the bulk of media advertising revenue, and the FDA gets half of its annual operating budget from Big Pharma.
Quarantining the sick for a short period is an appropriate medical measure. Quarantining the entire healthy population is not.
These are experimental vaccines that, unlike traditional vaccines, insert genetic material into your cells and this material instructs your cells to make spike proteins; your white cells then attack your own cells that have these spike proteins. Questions have arisen as to whether the cells attacked might not be the cells lining your blood vessels, for example, and whether this could cause clotting or other harms, or whether a booster shot might trigger the immune system to mount an aggressive and devastating response against our own cells that are producing these spike proteins. These issues haven’t been addressed adequately.
Vaccination with experimental vaccines should not be in the forefront of our measures to combat Covid-19 and its variants; ivermectin should be. This is a cheap, safe, effective drug against Covid-19 and variants. Will it prevent all Covid-19? No (and neither will the vaccines.) But along with common-sense measures that we know boost the immune system– to give it an edge in fighting Covid-19– ivermectin can allow us to fully re-open and get back to normal with no undue fear. Those who are frail should, of course, take extra precautions as they see fit.
Why is the medical profession as a whole fighting so hard against ivermectin? Who is instructing them to do this, when the evidence is clear that this is a safe and efficacious drug?
Unfortunately, it appears that vaccines could be a means of government control and could be aiding the push toward a “great reset” of humanity along the lines of Chinese society, where it’s said that the government can find anyone within five minutes due to the omnipresence of cell phones and cameras. Once vaccine passports are mandated– if we’re so dull as to allow this– then all sorts of information can be tagged to your passport profile that allows you to get into airports, for example, or even the supermarket. Are you spreading “misinformation”? Were you neglecting your mask? This gets added to your profile and you might be deemed a danger to society. This may be fantasy, but freedom requires vigilance and we should just say “no” to any such passport scheme, as beyond any shadow of doubt this is exactly what those who push the WEF’s Great Reset agenda, and their ally, China, want for us. Their scheme depends on all of us pulling together for the collective good, and for this to happen we have to be monitored and managed for compliance– after all, the “necessity” for this would be the threat of imminent catastrophic global warming (another “emergency”?) I’m not making this up: the need for a collective reset is there in WEF founder Klaus Schwab’s book, “Covid-19: The Great Reset.” Fauci, Kerry, Biden, Harris, Gates: they’re all in on the necessity for saving the planet from sure and imminent catastrophe. Only there is no threat: CO2 warming is Lysenkoism. The fact that they’re making a non-existent threat into a dire emergency should be ringing alarm bells. No CO2 warming, no need for reset; reset utterly depends on the fear of CO2 warming.
Those of us who are in the older age groups may not understand the immense power of technology that can be used to monitor and manage the population; this technology is already here.
Stay safe re-set: stay free.