Beware- This is a long one for me. There are also no memes, no platitudes and no mention of the #IMWChallenge other than this sentence.
I recently came across a new articleand one of the authors just happens to be everyone’s favorite bureaucratic immunologist, Dr. Anthony (don’t call me Tony) Fauci.
The article is available online if you care to read it on your own. Then again I don’t know why you would want to read it yourself, unless of course you lost a bet? So let me summarize below.
I will pull parts of the article I found interesting and give you my take or critique as well, like it or not. First let it be known to all that I am NOT an immunologist. I do NOT do research in a lab. I do NOT write research papers. I do NOT have a government job where I decide who is worthy of government funding. Instead I am a lowly private family physician who prefers to just treat individuals, one at a time, while offering both evidenced based medicine, experienced based medicine, and as full informed consent about health, wellness and medical treatments as I am able.
So below there are excerpts of the Fauci article that I will either change the wording or add a some comments after to fit the reality of COVID as I have seen and experienced it on the front lines in my practice over the past two years.
A herd immunity threshold is the proportion of a population with immunity against a communicable disease agent (resulting from innate immunity, natural infection, or vaccination) above which transmission of the agent is largely prevented, except for sporadic outbreaks in under-vaccinated or otherwise incompletely protected subsets of individuals.
The above paragraph I actually agree with. Well almost!
“transmission of the agent is largely prevented, except for sporadic outbreaks in under-vaccinated or otherwise incompletely protected subsets of individuals.”
The reality of the COVID experience the past few years is that once the original COVID strain mutated, the COVID vaccines that were based on the original COVID strain were no longer effective at blocking transmission of COVID. In regular words that everyone but a bureaucrat could understand it means that the COVID vaccines did a poor job of protecting people from getting infected as well as spreading the virus once the variants became dominant.
However, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is so different from polio and measles that classical herd immunity may not readily apply to it. Important differences include the phenotypic stability of polio and measles viruses, and their ability to elicit long-term protective immunity, compared to SARS-CoV-2. For these and other reasons, controlling COVID-19 by increasing herd immunity may be an elusive goal.
We agree on something! Must be a full moon tonight.
With influenza, for example, the inadequacy or limited durability of immunity after vaccination or infection, and the continual antigenic drifting and occasional pandemic-producing antigenic shifting, has foiled attainment of strong herd immunity threshold effects.
Agree again. COVID is not that much different. Antigenic drifting/shifting is another way of saying new strains that evade previous immunity keep naturally occurring.
I would have hoped our NIH and FDA leadership would have understood this BEFORE coercing, threatening and mandating a treatment that quickly would lose effectiveness.
Time and again, human movement and other human behaviors have circumvented physical barriers between the infectious and the susceptible.
Umm, that word “MOVEMENT” is called freedom. In this country we are supposed to have the right to move freely as long as we are not imposing a purposeful danger to others. Does anyone else think the restrictions on society impinged on those freedoms? Perhaps instead of restricting the freedoms of those less susceptible to serious harms from COVID, we should have done a better job of protecting the most vulnerable in society?? Hey, just thinking out loud.
For many common respiratory viruses such as influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), the barriers to achieving herd immunity are even greater than with measles, polio, and smallpox. These barriers include asymptomatic transmission, incomplete or short-duration protective immunity, and viral immune escape. Indeed, for many such respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, immunity is itself a fluid concept, ranging from complete and durable (long-lasting) immunity that fully protects against infections, to immunity that protects against severe disease but does not prevent reinfection and onward transmission.
Agree with most but, I have not seen any real reputable studies that prove that the COVID vaccines gave long term protection once the first variant emerged. I keep hearing how the vaccinated have been protected from serious harms but I have seen numerous studies and interpretations to the contrary as well. When I see many sides to an issue, I tend to go with Team Reality and believe more of what I see. I do NOT believe anything out of anyone or anything that has gain from following their advice.
This goes for politicians, Big Pharma, Big Tech and of course the Media.
HERD IMMUNITY AND COVID-19. There are significant obstacles to achieving complete herd immunity with COVID-19.
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This is me now- No Duh!!!
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“Classical” herd immunity, leading to disease eradication or elimination, almost certainly is an unattainable goal. As noted, mass vaccination and aggressive public health approaches have struggled to control other (seemingly more controllable) respiratory infectious diseases, such as smallpox, measles, and rubella, all caused by viruses with limited phenotypic evolution. Controlling SARS-CoV-2 and its cycles of new variants presents a much more formidable challenge. Like influenza, SARS-CoV-2 mutates continually into new variants that can escape immunity derived from infections and vaccines. It also can be transmitted asymptomatically and without pathognomonic signs, impeding public health control. SARS-CoV-2 appears not to substantially engage the systemic immune system, as do viruses such as smallpox, measles, and rubella that consistently have a pronounced viremic phase. Moreover, neither infection nor vaccination appears to induce prolonged protection against SARS- CoV-2 in many or most people. Finally, the public health community has encountered substantial resistance to efforts to control the spread of SARS- CoV-2 by vaccination, mask wearing, and other interventions.
Wow! So much to unpack here.
Herd immunity is an unattainable goal. This is what Fauci now believes but it is not what he was saying for the past two years. So for two years our country and much of the world has had their freedoms restricted, governments overturned, trillions of dollars printed, spent and wasted, and what did we get out of it? I’ll let you answer that but remember all these things occurred because what Dr. Fauci believed over two years ago when he helped preside over the infamous “15 days to slow the spread”, he was wrong about!
The COVID variants could not be contained nor slowed by vaccines. In fact there are many scientists who have shown how it was the vaccinations that were leaky, meaning not only did they not slow the spread, but they sped up the variants that evaded the vaccines. Perhaps this was a good thing if the variants turned out to be less deadly? But ask yourself now while thinking back with an open mind what occurred the past two years, were all the other restrictions helpful or hurtful in the long run?
Public Health encountered resistance? That’s an understatement. But do you think there would have been this much resistance if their guidance actually worked?
If vaccine- or infection-induced immunity to SARS-CoV-2 indeed proves to be short-lived (((IT IS))), or if escape mutants continue to emerge (((THEY WILL))), viral spread may continue indefinitely, albeit hopefully at a low endemic level. This notably has occurred with the 1918 pandemic influenza virus, whose viral descendants still are causing seasonal outbreaks and occasional pandemics 104 years later (pandemic H2N2 in 1957, H3N2 in 1968, and H1N1 in 2009) (24), and which we have been unable, after more than 80 years of trying, to fully control with vaccines. Such factors probably make SARS-CoV-2 impossible to eradicate (only one human virus – smallpox -- has ever been eradicated), difficult to eliminate over long periods within large geographic areas, and difficult to satisfactorily control even with good vaccines.
I hope Dr. Fauci is not implying that we have good vaccines against COVID. If he truly believes that, well, I better not say.
Thus, COVID-19 is likely to be with us, even if at a very low level of endemic community spread and with lower severity, for the foreseeable future. Like influenza, any level of herd protection against SARS-CoV-2 potentially can be overcome by ever-changing levels of immunity among countless sub-populations, by human movement, crowding, changes in social or prevention behaviors, by demographics,
by vaccination levels, by variations in durability of infection- orvaccine-induced immunity,and by evolution of viral variants, among many other variables.
Yea, but since we don’t have a COVID vaccine that prevents infection or transmission, then I will put a strikethrough some of his words that are just not part of the reality.
But encouragingly, after more than two years of viral circulation, and more than a year of vaccines with boosters, we now have a high degree of background population immunity to SARS-CoV-2, as well as medical countermeasures such as antiviral drugs and monoclonal antibodies to prevent progression of disease, and widely available diagnostic tests. With these interventions we can aspire to, and very likely will succeed in achieving, substantial control of community spread without the disruptions of society caused by COVID-19 over the past 2 years. We no longer need the elusive concept of “herd immunity” as an aspirational goal: COVID-19 control is already within our grasp.
Wow! Just what data and real life experience is Tony looking at?
The vaccines and boosters helped against the original strain of COVID. I have been saying that for a long time. But the original strain is gone replaced by all the vaccine evading variants that even Tony knows is occurring. We are doing better against COVID because the newer strains are less deadly to all but the highest risk people.
Boosters are the same as the original vaccine, just at a lower dose. But we already have seen from real life experience that the original strain is no longer circulating and only the vaccine evading variants are presently circulating. So why are they still pushing the boosters, a medical treatment that no longer helps? Would you use Penicillin to treat a bacteria that is resistant to Penicillin?
I believe the answer is $$ and politics both of which can be summed up byreading the book, “Ego is the Enemy.”
Further proof is that Tony was part of suppressing most old and inexpensive COVID treatments and instead only praising newer, less well studied and much more expensive Big Pharma drugs. How many people were harmed by not getting early treatment due to the suppression of cheap and safe early treatments?
Looking forward, more broadly protective vaccines could play important roles in controlling SARS-CoV-2 and its inevitable variants. Developing “universal” coronavirus vaccines (or at least universal SARS-CoV-2 vaccines that elicit durable and broadly protective immunity against multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants) is an important goal for the immediate future (23). Meanwhile, optimal COVID-19 control will require both classic, non- pharmacologic public health approaches and vaccination of many more people globally with the SARS-CoV-2-specific vaccines we already have, with booster shots and with updates to vaccine antigens if needed.
I don’t see how many can still trust Tony, Big Pharma and Public Health to focus more on individual health and freedoms as opposed to their political agendas. I just hope this escapade does not harm the long term good that Public Health and even Pharma has once enjoyed.
I also hope they keep researching to find vaccines that work and are safe. No more Operation Warp Speed. The Orange Man really screwed up with that program! If we are going to institute a totally new type of medical treatment that has never been widely used before, then do ALL the long term testing and make ALL the data readily available for all to see before bringing it out to the public.
Everyone deserves full informed consent for any medical treatment.
Living with COVID is best considered not as reaching a numerical threshold of immunity, but as optimizing population protection without prohibitive restrictions on our daily lives. Effective tools for prevention and control of COVID-19 (
vaccines, prevention measures) are available; if utilized, the road back to normality is achievable even without achieving classical herd immunity.
Sure now all of a sudden Tony is for not having prohibitive restrictions on our daily lives. Had he known this earlier, say about two years ago, perhaps all the millions of people harmed thru these restrictions, jobs lost, businesses closed, people fired from their jobs for not taking a new medical treatment, hospitals not allowing families to advocate for their loved ones, and so many more that I just don’t feel like writing would never have occurred.
In conclusion:
I hope everyone looks back on the past few years and thinks for themselves and decides what truly worked and what truly did not.
I really had hoped the government response to COVID would keep us safe.
I now ask you:
Do you think the government response to COVID was more helpful or harmful in the long run?
I read this, and it only reinforced what some of us always understood. This was NEVER about a virus. In a just world, the politicians and corporate overlords would be held accountable for destroying our society. Unfortunately, we do not live in a just world…..
Fabulous article, Doc. I think the government response has been horrible since after the first two weeks. I give some leeway there since we really had no idea what we were dealing with, but after that they really messed up. As soon as Trump said he wanted things opened by Easter and the hysteria started saying that was dangerous and inept, I knew we were in trouble.
If this was truly about health, the message about metabolic health would have been just as prevalent as the message about vaccines. And if they didn’t use the message “EVERYONE IS THE SAME! EVERYONE HAS THE SAME RISK!! EVEN HEALTHY TEENAGERS!! EVEN 5yo!! RUN, RUN, RUN TO GET YOUR JAB OR YOU’LL DIE!” then people may have been more willing. But when they say the ONLY method to stay safe is vaccines and then they had an all-out war on HCQ and IVM, their plan became clear. And when there were very few articles about HOW to lower your risk by getting metabolically healthy and not having comorbidities, they made it even more loud and clear. This was all about politics and money and the control Big Pharma has over everything.