Is Herd Immunity Still Likely?

COVID-19 seemed to be a serious uphill battle, that was until there was news that a vaccine was going to be released. We were over 60% vaccinated as a country and feeling really good around the start of July. That was until the Delta variant had emerged. As a country, it certainly put us on edge, but since we were getting vaccinated, who would of thought we would have had anything to worry about. Then we found out the Delta variant can be caught and transmitted even through fully vaccinated individuals. The chances to get COVID while being fully vaccinated is still lower than those that are unvaccinated, and there’s also a lower chance for vaccinated people to be hospitalized or die due to COVID. But if the virus keeps mutating, will we ever reach herd immunity?

Medical News Today states, “Scientists hoped that, following vaccination, populations would develop herd immunity to SARS-CoV-2, reducing the risk of infection, even for people without antibodies against the virus.” They continued on, “However, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group, Prof. Andrew Pollard, says herd immunity is “not a possibility” given how transmissible the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 is.” In my recent blogs I have speculated that there is a chance that we try to gain as much knowledge about COVID as possible so we can minimize it yearly with a vaccine much like how the flu operates, and this only makes me believe that even more. It’s certainly a scary situation, but if we can control it like we can control the flu, that would be huge. The problem is, it’s far more contagious than the flu is, so it’ll be hard to keep cases from getting out of control if a proper vaccine is not developed.

Hopefully we will learn more about the drug currently being used for controlling cholesterol, that can be used to fight COVID in the next few weeks. I wrote about that in my last blog.