Delta’s gift is hybrid immunity

How? ‘Or’ What? From the start, our mistake has been our strange reluctance to recognize the reality of mild or asymptomatic Covid. It started on day one with the World Health Organization and some experts choosing to exaggerate the Covid deadline by ignoring mild and invisible cases. The same myopia continues to wreak havoc today with our ability to answer a crucial question: How prevalent is the Delta variant among vaccinees? The United States is desperately trying to draw conclusions from unrepresentative data.

During the Massachusetts epidemic that set off the government’s wake-up call, more than 300 vaccinated vacationers then tested positive. Were they 100% or 1% of those who returned home with the virus? No idea.

In Chicago, 127 of 203 cases associated with the Lollapalooza Music Festival were fully vaccinated people. Same question. Are they the tip or all of the iceberg? No idea.

With more young Covid victims hitting hospitals, is it because Delta is more virulent or because there are a lot more Delta than we know? Again, your government doesn’t have the foggiest.

Now, three other vaccinated US senators have fallen with Covid this week.

This chosen myopia about invisible propagation has proven to be costly, but in a way that hints at its political utility. In January 2020, we could tell ourselves that the Covid was not there because we had not detected any case. Later, when the pandemic was in full swing, the overestimation of the risk of death and the underestimation of natural immunity helped rally support for blockages, masking and compliance with vaccine deployment.

Yet why would scientists like Anthony Fauci and CDC leaders settle for inadequate data? A reasonable presumption is that people don’t ask questions they don’t want answered. From the start, our public health experts were realistic, if not fatalistic, about the virus. The CDC on its webpage has said for months that every American should expect to be infected afterwards. This advice only disappeared when political messaging became paramount. Accentuating how the viral spread remained unobserved and unmeasured was apparently not on the agenda.

Delta has made such a motivated myopia more lasting. The virus that causes Covid is a single-stranded RNA virus, that is to say, subject to frequent mutations, such as influenza, which requires a new vaccine each year.

The public is struck by absurdly late headlines saying Covid will not go away. Her favorite, media-endorsed epidemiologists are now warning everyone must get it sooner or later. Harvard’s Michael Mina announces it’s not the worst thing right now, it’s the vaccinated people who get asymptomatic Delta infections – a boost against future variants that may be as robust as those the government will be handing out .

And more absurd than ever is the censorship of social media experts saying something slightly complicated about masks or vaccine reluctance, as if their jarring thoughts have yet to be suppressed in the name of final elimination. of Covid.

This propaganda is now detrimental to the real purpose. The surprise ahead for Americans is that hybrid immunity, or vaccination plus inevitable exposure to an evolving virus, is our new outcome. As much as it was fair to try to soften that adjustment, look at Japan today, with hospitals in Tokyo on the verge of collapsing under the weight of a Delta outbreak. Look at New Zealand, an entire nation stuck on what was initially a single Delta case. These countries have yet to find a way to make peace with the virus and allow natural immunity to play its part in the domestication of an unwanted new guest who will not leave. China will be the ultimate case study: facing Delta with more than a billion people who are immunologically naive or dependent on substandard vaccines.

If you think nongovernmental scientists were immune to myopia motivated by invisible spread, read a Washington Post editorial published last week by two epidemiologists at Boston University. They engage in otherwise interesting herd immunity calculations based on the garbage in-and-out assumption that only 35 million Americans (the official number) have so far been infected.

Even the CDC has long since emerged from its fog. Its official “tracker” may still focus on such “reported” cases, but the agency quietly estimates that 120 million Americans had been infected as of May 1 during the invisible and unmeasured pandemic to which Americans have reported. been faced.