Sue Halpern writes:

A race to vaccinate the world is not an effort to achieve herd immunity. At least in this country, that goal was a kind of marketing device, a way of inspiring people to abide by masking and social-distancing rules while waiting for a vaccine, and then to encourage everyone to do their part by getting immunized once vaccines were available. In the beginning, public-health officials, including Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, suggested that herd immunity would occur when sixty to seventy per cent of the population had been vaccinated. On the other side of that threshold, they suggested, was a magical return to the land of indoor dining, casual sex, and visits to grandparents. Later we were told that the number was more likely eighty per cent. Most recently, Fauci notched that number upward again, to ninety per cent. (When asked why he stuck with the earlier numbers when he knew them to be too low, he said that he didn’t think the country was ready to hear the truth.)

For reasons ranging from vaccine access to outright rejection by around twenty-five per cent of eligible Americans, getting to ninety per cent is not possible. Even if it were, we’d still likely have to contend with low rates of immunization elsewhere in the world, including at our northern and southern borders. (According to the latest Times tracker, less than ten per cent of Mexicans and only about six per cent of Canadians are fully vaccinated; the United States is rising from forty per cent.) A more realistic objective is to use mass vaccination to create a bulwark of resistance to prevent the virus from tearing through populations like wildfire. While there still would be flareups, they would die down once the virus lacked a sufficient number of hosts. But, without a concerted global commitment to vaccine equity, poorer regions will remain vulnerable to ferocious outbreaks, giving the SARS-CoV-2 virus the opportunity to evolve and, in a worst-case scenario, result in a chronic, never-ending pandemic. [Continue reading…]