author: Kevin Curran PhD

written: 2/11/2021

How will new virus variants affect our path to herd immunity?

In the U.S., we are currently vaccinating about 1.5M people a day. Thankfully, we can now track a meaningful drop in new cases of Covid-19.

Yet, at the same time we are now seeing new variants emerge globally. These new variants may change the trajectory of our path to herd immunity.

I opine on these topics on the adjacent video.

When recording the video, I forgot to mention this other piece of incredibly good news. In the most extensive real-world test so far, ‘Israel has demonstrated that a robust coronavirus vaccination program can have a quick and powerful impact, showing the world a plausible way out of the pandemic’. It should be noted the Pfizer vaccine used in this Israel study also showed protection for the B.1.1.7 variant. See link below for remarkable graphs to illustrate this point. https://www.ft.com/content/0cdc8563-1e6d-4089-bedb-b0f675c0d683

References:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Feb. 9 about 32.9 million people have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine in US, including about 9.8 million people who have been fully vaccinated. CDC page tracking vaccination numbers: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations

Decline in cases/deaths: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/02/10/world/covid-19-coronavirus#us-coronavirus-deaths-though-still-high-are-in-a-sustained-decline

Moderna vaccine effectiveness with new variants

Scientists are concerned about the variant because clinical trials of vaccines are showing that they offer less protection against B.1.351 than other variants. People who recover from other variants may not be able to fend off B.1.351.

https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/25/moderna-vaccine-less-effective-variant/