Our latest post was submitted by Bill Corish and is definitely worth the time to read and consider. Thanks, Bill.
I wrote this piece to flesh out my September 12 comment in Clete Torres’ “Always Remember” post. My thinking here is still a work in progress. I would appreciate further review and discussion of my understandings regarding the technical aspects of “herd immunity” with respect to COVID-19, as well as the rest of the piece.
My understandings:
- The herd immunity threshold for a virus has been reached when the slope of the increase in daily infections begins to lessen. For the U.S. as an aggregate, these “inflection points” occurred at the following approximate dates for COVID-19:
Original virus ~ Thanksgiving, 2020
delta variant ~ one month ago
Ref: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-tricky-math-of-covid-19-herd-immunity-20200630/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us
- The percentage of our population that had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in their blood on each date was:
Thanksgiving, 2020 ~10%
One month ago >90% (this is an extrapolation from the reference)
Ref: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2784013
Both vaccination and recovery from infection provide excellent protection from severe Covid-19 infection or re-infection, at least for the near term. (Long-term protection yet to be known)
I do not view President Biden as a particularly bright man. However, I’m sure there are people in his administration and fellow travelers outside of it who are quite intelligent. Assuming the above understandings are all correct, these people must be aware there is no significant public health benefit to vaccinating everyone. All medical sources I’ve read and listened to agree the delta variant is highly contagious. This is born out by the steep rise in percentage of people with antibodies described in the JAMA reference. It looks like virtually every American will have some level of immunity within a matter of weeks. The new case curve has crested and is trending downward. The active case curve is soon to follow. This will relieve pressure on hospital ICU beds (though not evenly across the nation).
So why impose nationwide vaccine mandates now? Many have said they serve only as a distraction from the Afghanistan withdrawal and other debacles. The mandates have accomplished this partially and at least for a time, but I am skeptical this is the primary reason for Biden’s imposition of them.
Like most of the democrat party leadership, at least at the national level, Biden is a socialist at heart. He is surrounded and propped up by socialists. Donald Trump’s presidency was a clear and present threat to their long march toward utopia. Though sold as “putting the adults back in charge”, Biden’s presidency was foisted upon America to return us to their righteous path of progressivism.
But his administration has been a disaster thus far and I think the socialists are desperate. I see these mandates as a last-ditch effort to portray President Biden as the well-meaning authoritarian who saved us from the current COVID-19 surge, or at least tried to. They hope this will help recover his public image. And it would serve their greater purpose of further displacing Americans’ faith in God with faith in an all-powerful human government.
If my technical understandings above are right, the U.S. is soon to witness a precipitous decline in active cases brought on by a delta variant herd immunity which has already arrived. But President Biden can count on his party’s legion of media cohorts to do their best to ignore and, when needed, to obscure the lack of any causal relationship between this event and his mandates.
It is worthy to note that the sixth and last point of the President’s plan mentions his administration’s efforts to “improve the care of those who do get COVID-19.” I fully support that part of his plan. But its placement amongst his edicts, along with the cynical goal I see in the mandates, gives me no confidence that he sees it as a priority deserving a sincere and whole-hearted effort.
