It’s going to be with us for a long time:
Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.
Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.
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.
How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.
Continued immunizations, especially for people at highest risk because of age, exposure or health status, will be crucial to limiting the severity of outbreaks, if not their frequency, experts believe.
“The virus is unlikely to go away,” said Rustom Antia, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta. “But we want to do all we can to check that it’s likely to become a mild infection.”
The shift in outlook presents a new challenge for public health authorities. The drive for herd immunity — by the summer, some experts once thought possible — captured the imagination of large segments of the public. To say the goal will not be attained adds another “why bother” to the list of reasons that vaccine skeptics use to avoid being inoculated.
Yet vaccinations remain the key to transforming the virus into a controllable threat, experts said.
Sigh. Well, I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so:
These people are not babies. They know what they are doing and they have agency. They are unreachable on many things, including this. I do not believe there is anything that will reach them.
It means we are going to have to live with this virus being our midst and come to accept that these people are going to provide hosts for it to mutate into something that the current vaccines cannot defeat. I think that’s just the way it is. They are determined not to do anything to keep that from happening and there’s nothing we can do about it.
I think we need to hope that science comes to the rescue with availability of treatments like the monoclonal antibody treatment that saved Trump (and his elderly cronies with comorbidities) and vaccines that can be turned around quickly to deal with the variants. Counting on herd immunity with people like this in our society is a false hope. They are nihilist know-nothings. And there are millions of them.
Yep. Just hope science can keep up with it.