from the Daily Wire:
U.S. Will Reach Herd Immunity For COVID-19 By April, Johns Hopkins Doctor Says
“Scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth.”
Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at the renowned Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, on Friday sent shockwaves through the medical community in a Wall Street Journal piece headlined, “We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April.”
“There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection,” Makary writes. “As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.”
The spread of COVID-19 spiked after family gatherings over Thanksgiving and Christmas, but they’ve been plunging ever since.
Why? “In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity,” he writes.
“Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast. Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.”
Makary says antibody studies are likely underestimating natural immunity, saying survivors of the 1918 Spanish flu “were found in 2008 — 90 years later — to have memory cells still able to produce neutralizing antibodies.”
“In my own conversations with medical experts, I have noticed that they too often dismiss natural immunity, arguing that we don’t have data. The data certainly doesn’t fit the classic randomized-controlled-trial model of the old-guard medical establishment. There’s no control group. But the observational data is compelling,” he writes.
