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Herd immunity will most likely not be achieved in 2021 – WHO expert
Kaieteur News – Chairman of the World Health Organization (WHO)’s Outbreak Alert and Response Network, Dale Fisher, has stated that herd immunity to the COVID-19 virus most likely will not be achieved in 2021. Herd immunity, is when a significant portion of a country’s population is immunized against a virus providing indirect protection to those who are not immune to the specific disease. With herd immunity, the infection effectively stops spreading.
Chairman of WHO’s Outbreak Alert and Response Network, Dale Fisher
While speaking at a Reuters Next conference, Fisher stated that “We won’t go back to normal quickly, and it won’t occur over one day. We know we need to get to herd immunity and we need that in a majority of countries, so we are not going to see that in 2021.”
Notably, experts have estimated that for a country to have herd immunity against COVID-19, at least 80 percent of the population needs to be vaccinated. According to a Reuters tally, more than 90 million people have been infected by the virus globally and about 1.9 million have died since it first emerged in China in December 2019.
Fisher asserted that there might be some countries that might achieve the herd immunity, but even then, they may not necessarily go back to “normal,” especially in terms of border control measures seeking to prevent the virus from getting out and coming in. Vaccines are already being rolled out in countries across the world, including Guyana, with the Oxford-Astra Zeneca vaccine currently being used to immunize frontline health care workers.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca, Sinopharm, Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are a few of the developed COVID-19 vaccines seeing mass global rollout currently.
During the conference, the Chairman also said that as countries approach herd immunity with COVID-19 vaccines, the first thing that will be observed is a halt in mass community transmission. However, he doesn’t believe COVID-19 is going away. Fisher explained that it is not the nature of such viruses. The virus can be controlled, “but I still think, forevermore, there’ll still be cases,” he said. There will be clusters, “But if we can control it with vaccines, then we’ll be limiting that community, that mass spread that we’re seeing,” Fisher added.
Further, he stated that as vaccines continue to roll out to achieve herd immunity, there will be an ease in restrictions that were implemented to protect citizens and curb the spread of the virus. “We’re obviously a long way away from that in most countries. And I must say, before I hand over, this is — this is if things go well. We don’t know everything that’s needed to know about the vaccine yet,” the Chairman lamented.
He said that while everyone can be confident that the vaccine is safe and effective in the short term, there is a lot that needs to be learnt about what the future with the vaccines looks like.
Additionally, he said that if the efficacy of the vaccines wears off after six or 12 months, then there’s going to be new problems arising.
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