Was COVID-19 herd immunity a false hope, Nature Journal’s Christie Aschwanden pondered on March 24, 2021. We thought it would bring things to normal after mass vaccination when the pandemic was young. We are learning this is unlikely now it is maturing. That’s because of a combination of vaccine hesitancy, emergence of new variants, and delayed arrival of child vaccinations, Christie says.
The Vaccine Would Have Helped, But For the Variants
Epidemiologist Lauren Ancel Meyers, executive director at Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium joined the conversation. The vaccine will naturally scatter the virus, she says. But then new variants will arise as infection immunity weakens. We may still be fighting surges months or years from now.
It’s beginning to look as if COVID-19 herd immunity was indeed a false hope. The pandemic is showing signs of becoming an infectious disease, circulating in pockets of global population for years to come. Nature Journal advances that theory on the basis of a survey of 100 acknowledged experts. These include immunologists, infectious-disease researchers, and virologists working on the coronavirus.
Was COVID-19 Herd Immunity False Hope, Do Vaccines Help?
Our COVID vaccines prevent symptoms developing for an uncertain period. However, there’s little evidence they block transmissions, which is essential for herd immunity to mature. So says Shweta Bansal, a mathematical biologist at Georgetown University in Washington DC.
The speed and distribution of the vaccination roll out – or lack of it – is a compounding factor. Matt Ferrari is an epidemiologist at Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics in University Park.
He believes a perfectly coordinated vaccine program ‘could have wiped out COVID-19, at least theoretically’ but we missed that opportunity. The longer it takes to stem transmission, the more time variants have to emerge and spread. That dream of herd immunity may turn out to be just that, but we hope that is not the case.
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