Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ from Covid Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe
I think this problem is more complex than many talk about and it ends up just being fear based news.<p>People aren&#x27;t hesitant to get the vaccine because it might have Bill Gates microchips, they are hesitant because this was the fastest rolled out vaccine in human history (&gt;3x faster than the second) and people don&#x27;t trust the government. Their concerns aren&#x27;t founded in science, but they are reasonable. So treating them as unreasonable is going to make them double down on their position. What&#x27;s worse is that some news organizations ask similar questions but never answer (come on, you&#x27;re the news and you can&#x27;t google? WTF, no wonder people don&#x27;t trust you). If you want to see the exaggerated version of this look at Russia where few trust the government and there is higher hesitancy to take Sputnik V.<p>Also we can&#x27;t forget how the definition of herd immunity has changed. Back when the pandemic started I and many others warned that changing the definition of herd immunity to mean only herd immunity built through natural infection would empower anti-vaxers. Places like Nature[0] are supposed to be the place to get scientific news but botched this (even disagreeing with the experts they are quoting in the article), and they aren&#x27;t the only one. This makes things rather confusing for people. This build distrust, and now we&#x27;re seeing the repercussions of that. So when someone like Tucker Carlson goes on air and asks a bunch of questions and is always saying that the government wants you to &quot;shut up and listen&quot; (a common phrase) of course people question.<p>But these people will change, I&#x27;ve seen it. They have a bunch of questions but no answers, and like many, often don&#x27;t know how to find them. This may be obvious to us who are so used to the internet and google daily to do our jobs, but these people don&#x27;t even know how to do that or find credible sources. So it then comes down to us, the &quot;smart people&quot;, to help. To talk about how doctors have been taking the vaccines for months before we got access. That politicians and wealthy white people wouldn&#x27;t take it if it was an experiment. There&#x27;s a lot of data to show that this isn&#x27;t some grand experiment (well it is, but not in the way those people think experiments are. Maybe leave that nuance out?). But you have to do this without making the person feel like a fool. If you do this I promise they will soon change their minds. As for the 5G&#x2F;Bill Gates people, well luckily they are a very small minority. Let&#x27;s just not give them a platform. And don&#x27;t equate vaccine hesitancy for that. It will just make the path to herd immunity more difficult.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-020-02948-4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-020-02948-4</a>