Biden’s Herd Immunity Reality Check And Trouble In South Africa
"We thought they had indicated there was a lot more vaccine available," Joe Biden said, in a CBS interview taped Friday and aired Sunday. "That didn’t turn out to be the case."
It was a blunt assessment of a sobering reality. The previous administration was perhaps more derelict in its pandemic duties than feared, which is saying something because partisanship aside, I doubt many rational people on either side of the aisle were truly under the impression that things were going any semblance o
Looks like we are going to need a few things right now.
First, an updated vaccine(s).
Second, far faster production.
Third, far faster distribution.
We need to be able to go from new mutant identification, to total population re-vaccination, in one year at most and preferably less.
I am surprised and somewhat disappointed at how slow the rollout has been with this first vaccine, and let’s hope we get better at it with time.
How come more factories to build vaccine have not been under construction in locations around the world? Does anyone know why this obvious question is not ever discussed?
Aside from our living in a system of capitalism that devours itself, what am I missing?
Because Trump abdicated any and all responsibility for being the leader of the free world. So now we have a virus with a solid 12 months of reproduction time to breed mutations and another 6+ before it begins hitting serious resistance in the host population. By then we can expect dozens of variants and very likely some that are immune to vaccinations.
So we need actual tools that respond faster. We need total population testing. Once it’s over we can immunize for all known strains. Until then this could be a very long and sustained economic drag.
“How come more factories to build vaccine have not been under construction in locations around the world?”
The short answer is that medicine is not a non-profit public service. Rather, it is a business and vaccines don’t make any money. Once you build a plant, you are stuck with it. Further, huge numbers of people keep saying they don’t plan to get the vaccine so firms are wary of over capacity, especially with six or seven companies waiting in the wings, potentially adding more capacity.
Biden’s announcement of not reaching herd immunity by the end of summer may seem like a reality check but Bloomberg’s model estimates it will likely be seven yeas before we reach that goal. Even if we split the difference it is unlikely things will even approach normality before Super Bowl LVIII. (Maybe Brady will finally be retired by then.)
J&J vacine may keep severe illness at bay. I will look again but recall that it was trialed in South Africa and although people did get infected it kept the number of severe illness low.
To add to Elmer’s list… We’ll need a lot more testing to identify new strains emerging and spreading and their threat level, more factories making vaccines (the US is around 10% vaccinated and Africa hasn’t started) and enough vaccination stations (including the local pharmacies) to vaccinate everyone within one season (assuming normal flu vaccinations are carried out in the fall before the flu season actually gets going). Looks like a growth industry to me.
2000 participants, median age 31, no severe or moderate disease detected, the placebo group a little worse than the vaccinated group.
This says virtually nothing about the efficacy of the vaccine and should be ignored until it is ripped apart in the peer review process.
Somebody is playing games.
What should not be ignored is the spread of the variants. We are in real deep sh*t here and unless a miracle occurs, the forth wave that I had predicted is well on its way. Sucks!!!