For herd immunity, we need vaccines to prevent transmission. They probably will to some extent but we should expect that protection to
- be weaker than protection against symptomatic infection
- wane over time
- be eroded first by new variants
2/
The herd immunity threshold was always going to be a challenge & variants make it even harder.
That means COVID-19 will probably keep circulating but the good news! Vaccines can still prevent people from getting seriously sick & dying. Life is normal again. Pandemic ends. 3/
Frankly, preventing severe disease is all scientists expected of vaccines, as I wrote last year, before we knew the vaccines would be so good.
The 95% efficacy number got hopes up, and now the variants are tempering them again. 4/
At the start of the pandemic, COVID-19 had 3 possible fates:
1) global elimination like SARS 2) local elimination through herd immunity like measles 3) endemic like common cold coronaviruses
5/
#1 has been a foregone conclusion since at least last spring. #2 looked possible for a while. #3 was always the most likely and now seems even more so.
6/
Another analogy is influenza. When flu pandemics end, that virus doesn’t disappear. It becomes the dominant seasonal flu for years afterward.
We’re going to be living with this coronavirus for a long time, but vaccines will make it a lot easier to live with.
7/
Personally, the “no herd immunity” scenario makes me more eager to get vaccinated. It means I will probably get exposed COVID-19 at some point, and I’d much rather have some immunity from a vaccine than none at all.
/end
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1/ Hello, I have a story I've been working on for a long time—long before there was a pandemic, if you can believe it. It’s about the past and future of our children’s DNA.
2/ I went to Denmark, where prenatal screening for Down syndrome is near universal and only 18 children with Down syndrome were born in the entire country last year.
But, this isn’t only about Denmark or only about Down syndrome...
3/ This is a story about how genetics limits—but can also expand—what we consider “normal.”
Ever since the pandemic began, I've been haunted by stories of coronavirus patients dying alone.
I spoke to a palliative care team caring for these patients in a Boston ICU. They were often the last ones—the only ones—in the room when a patient died.
This small detail about the iPads for families to say goodbye to dying patients gutted me.
It's so hard to hold the plastic-wrapped iPad so that everything is in the camera frame. An intimate and sacred moment, made almost absurd by tech difficulties.
In 2016, I was writing about the return of flesh-eating screwworms in Florida, when I learned about a U.S. government program that sounded totally bonkers
Every week, planes drop millions of sterilized screwworms over the border of Panama and Colombia, creating a transcontinental "barrier" to the pests far, far away from the U.S.
Here's one of the planes getting loaded with chilled boxes of adult screwworms: