**CDC shifts pandemic goals away from reaching herd immunity **
Since the earliest days of the pandemic, there has been one collective goal for bringing it to an end: achieving herd immunity. That's when so many people are immune to a virus that it runs out of potential hosts to infect, causing an outbreak to sputter out.
Many Americans embraced the novel farmyard phrase, and with it, the projection that once 70% to 80% or 85% of the population was vaccinated against COVID-19, the virus would go away and the pandemic would be over.
Now the herd is restless. And experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have set aside herd immunity as a national goal.
The prospects for meeting a clear herd-immunity target are "very complicated," said Dr. Jefferson Jones, a medical officer on the CDC’s COVID-19 Epidemiology Task Force.
“Thinking that we’ll be able to achieve some kind of threshold where there’ll be no more transmission of infections may not be possible,” Jones acknowledged last week to members of a panel that advises the CDC on vaccines.
Vaccines have been quite effective at preventing cases of COVID-19 that lead to severe illness and death, but none has proved reliable at blocking transmission of the virus, Jones noted. Recent evidence has also made clear that the immunity provided by vaccines can wane in a matter of months.
The result is that even if vaccination were universal, the coronavirus would probably continue to spread.
“We would discourage” thinking in terms of “a strict goal,” he said.
To Dr. Oliver Brooks, a member of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, it was a sobering new message, with potentially worrisome effects.
With just 58.5% of all Americans fully vaccinated, “we do need to increase" the uptake of COVID-19 shots, said Brooks, chief medical officer of Watts Healthcare in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, he said, Jones' unexpected admission "almost makes you less motivated to get more people vaccinated.”
Brooks said he worries that as the CDC backs off a specific target for herd immunity, it will take the air out of efforts to run up vaccination levels.
And if public health officials stop talking about the “herd,” people may lose sight of the fact that vaccination is not just an act of personal protection but a way to protect the community. . . .
Evidence that the science was correct. "Don't mass vaccinate during a pandemic" it drives variants and the vaccine does not protect the vaccinated from the variants. We will be on a never ending merry-go-round with this cluster F#@K.
So, in theory, this would make vaccine mandates pointless, because in my mind, this translates to we're no longer in State of Emergency and we admit there really isn't anything we can do about it spreading because the vaccine doesn't work. Or, am I missing something?
I think you’re bang on, the problem, as always is getting the government to do something based on logic.
I’m old enough to remember when the herd immunity level was 40% of the population.
This just means since herd won't happen they will need to require the death poke forever.
Didn’t Iceland’s Chief Epidemiologist say that months ago? He went onto say the only way to achieve herd immunity was for people to catch it. After the MSM feeding frenzy he backtracked a day or two later with some b.s. excuse.
Stands to reason.
"Vaccines" and herd immunity are mutually exclusive.
They'll probably still argue for "mini-herd" immunity in each work place---how else can they justify the mandates?