In the UK, scientists are now voicing a similar pessimism about herd immunity brought about by vaccines.
According to The Telegraph, "The delta variant has wrecked any chance of herd immunity, a panel of experts including the head of the Oxford vaccine team said as they called for an end to mass testing so Britain can start to live with Covid.
"Scientists," the paper continued, "said it was time to accept that there was no way of stopping the virus spreading through the entire population, and monitoring people with mild symptoms was no longer helpful.
"Prof. Andrew Pollard, who led the Oxford vaccine team, said it was clear that the delta variant can infect people who have been vaccinated, which made herd immunity impossible to reach even with high vaccine uptake."
"We don't have anything that will stop transmission," said Pollard, "so I think we are in a situation where herd immunity is not a possibility and I suspect the virus will throw up a new variant that is even better at infecting vaccinated individuals."
Moreover, says the Telegraph, "Public Health England has shown that when vaccinated people catch the virus they have a similar viral load to unvaccinated individuals and may be as infectious."
Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia and an expert in infectious diseases, added further that the obsession with "cases" needed to be abandoned: "We need to start moving away from just reporting infections, or just reporting positive cases admitted to hospital, to actually start reporting the number of people who are ill because of Covid. Otherwise we are going to be frightening ourselves with very high numbers that actually don't translate into disease burden."
What this means for government policy remains to be seen. But since the worst of the totalitarianism has occurred under regimes seeking "zero COVID," and these scientists appear to believe such a thing is ridiculous, maybe it's good news.
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