This is helpful. Following @CT_Bergstrom and noticing how his position has evolved gives me hope that the global scientific community will eventually engage with us at increasing confidence on herd immunity threshold estimates whatever they might be. But this is super urgent!
Many of our critics base their arguments on comparisons with estimates for flu. My response is that in order for that comparison to be informative we would have to apply our models to previous flu epidemics. This is very high on my priority list but I lack resources.
The resistance to having our papers peer-reviewed (3 so far) is having several detrimental consequences. The most important is that our results, which rigorously give the most benign prognostics, are not reaching policymakers and the public as much as others.
Another consequence is that my informal team is now exhausted and under resourced, so high the resistance has been. I receive many requests to apply the models to other settings and diseases, to collaborate on other projects, to make code available...
but resources have been drained into a vacuum, so high the resistance to our results has been. Our latest preprint addresses most of concerns that have been presented to us but we have limited resources. The work is reproducible and falsifiable and I know that skepticism remains.
Could skeptics please work rigorously on their arguments and prove that concerns apply? Claims like "I believe this" but "I doubt that" only make us sink deeper. Happy to collaborate with such efforts in the best of my honesty and capacity, but I have very limited resources.
