The False Promise of a COVID-19 Vaccine

Illinois’s Gov. J. B. Pritzker has said that Illinois will not reopen until a vaccine for COVID-19 is available. The editors of the Sun-Times are apparently in agreement with him:

Central to the argument of many proponents for an immediate reopening of the country is that doing so would lead to the quick building of herd immunity among Americans, slamming the brakes on the spread of the virus. As Americans came down with COVID-19 and recovered — if they did not die — they would become immune to catching the bug again or passing it on.

But an array of medical experts have poured cold water on that notion in recent weeks, including Fauci on Tuesday. While it is “very likely” that people who have recovered from COVID-19 enjoy “a degree of protection,” Fauci said, nobody yet knows how intense or prolonged an exposure to the virus is necessary to gain immunity or how long it lasts.

Nor, he said, do we yet understand the full and long-term effects of the virus. He noted, for example, that doctors have just recently discovered the virus can cause “a very strange inflammatory syndrome” in children.

In order for Americans to develop herd immunity, experts say, an effective vaccination against the coronavirus must be developed, and the earliest that might happen is late fall or early winter.

In the meantime, what are we to make of supposed expert medical advice from the likes of radio talker Rush Limbaugh, who’s all for throwing open the country and pursuing herd immunity right now?

To take them seriously is to risk running out of coffins.

“Without a vaccine, over 200 million Americans would have to get infected before we reach this [immunity] threshold,” Johns Hopkins University epidemiologists David Dowdy and Gypsyamber D’Souza wrote recently. “If current daily death rates continue, over half a million Americans would be dead from COVID-19 by that time.”

Worldwide, 40 to 50 million people would likely die if countries decided to try and achieve herd immunity without a vaccine, University of Chicago associate professor Luis Barreiro, author of a recent study on herd immunity, told us.

“It’s completely irrational to consider that as an option,” Barreiro said.

Gov. J. B. Pritzker last week called it “an invitation for us to just let people die.”

There is presently no vaccine available for any coronavirus and it is quite possible that an effective vaccine will never be developed to protect against SARS-CoV-2. IMO the greatest likelihood is that, like many other related infections, SARS-CoV-2 will become endemic in the population and the best case scenario is that a vaccine will be developed that needs to be reformulated every year and protects a percentage of the population from 19% to 60% from the virus.

There is an alternative other than letting the entire United States or, indeed, the State of Illinois remain shut down until a vaccine that may never materialie is developed and that is what I support. There should be limited, systematic, and targeted reopenings rather than a radical reopening and this process should be informed by the best and most current information available.

The governor and the Sun-Times need to get their minds around the idea that remaining shut down forever is not a viable option. We will need to learn to live with some level of risk.