American “experts” agree with the Swedish MD/PhDs… 15 months later

by philg

From today’s New York Times, “Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe”:

Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

This is exactly what the Swedish MD/PhDs said 15 months ago, i.e., that coronavirus would be with us forever so it wouldn’t make sense to do anything that you wouldn’t be willing to do forever (e.g., close schools).

Let’s look at Sweden versus the eager mask-and-lockdown adopters such as the Czech Republic and the U.S. (varies by state):

Note that New Jersey, if it were its own country, would be #1 worldwide in COVID-19 death rate. New York and Maskachusetts are just behind NJ (chart). The front page of the NYT reminds me, based on IP geolocation, that right now is a great time to panic:

Everyone old/vulnerable is vaccinated and yet there is a “very high risk”?

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11 thoughts on “American “experts” agree with the Swedish MD/PhDs… 15 months later”

  1. I credit this blog and our host for helping me to connect the dots that this was going to be the case 15 months ago. I doubt I would have done it on my own until several months later. I had my doubts, just based on the fact that it’s a coronavirus – and until this moment we’ve never had a successful vaccine against one – but what convinced me was the effort you undertook to keep the commentary and analysis going.

  2. All I want to know is: When is Randi Weingarten going to get fired?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randi_Weingarten

    “Editorializing about Weingarten’s acceptance speech at the 2008 AFT convention, the New York Post commented that she had “laid out her vision for ‘community schools’ that do everything but, well, teach.” The Post described her as envisioning a “one-stop nanny state … owned and operated by Randi Weingarten & Co.” and suggested that her “push for all-purpose schools” was a way of “dodg[ing] teacher accountability in the one area schools are built for – teaching kids how to read, write and do numbers.”[125]…Writing in the New Yorker on August 31, 2009, Steven Brill quoted a school principal as saying that Weingarten “would protect a dead body in the classroom.”

    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/31/the-rubber-room

    • Alex,
      Large part of American education was going down the tubes for a long time before 2008. And there are many school districts that have been teaching kids well despite or not caring about Randi Weingarten. In essence Randi Weingarten is the kind of advocate that we are the people no longer allowed to have: working hard for her pay to protect those who hired her, fighting for them bare knuckled and clawing too. American system would work if those elected to represent us fight back same style.

  3. You can take off your mask when you can get on a plane without taking off your shoes…
    That is how it goes, if you go along with it, it will never end for you.

  4. My brother and I had a discussion March 2020 as we were bejng locked down, and came to the aame conclusions, but were so wrong about how long people wouqld be willingly locked up…never imagined restrictions in May 21!!! Or masks…
    We were right about the virus, and the optimal strategy, not the human reaction.

  5. I don’t follow this NYT article. “Herd immunity” results when the number vaccinated plus the number who have already been infected with Covid exceed a certain percentage of the population, thereby breaking the chain of transmission. This isn’t 100%, it’s less.

    Isn’t “herd immunity” inevitable, even if the timeframe is currently uncertain? If you chose not to vaccinate, you’ll either never catch it or catch it, but either way, this seems like it would end, at some point.

    This assumes that no Covid variant arises which the vaccines are ineffective against, of course.

    • As a testament to uncertainty of science and blind following of orders related to their health by many, those who vaccinated and those who have been infected are not mutually exclusive and overlap. I was surprised when I learned that recovered people took the vaccine. Given then most vaccinated people did not test for antibodies before vaccinating there should be fairly large number of people, in millions, who unknowingly vaccinated after not exhibiting sickness symptoms.

    • There are a lot of people who just blindly trust whatever the CDC comes up with:

      https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/faq.html

      “Yes, you should be vaccinated regardless of whether you already had COVID-19”

      I know a family who had the virus three months ago and got vaccinated nevertheless. The husband actually felt much worse after the second Pfizer injection than during his 2-3 day illness (high fever, weakness).

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