The actual article is in the WSJ at https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731
It got sent to me by a friend who has been downplaying the whole thing for a year so naturally he wants to declare victory and move on.
I happen to agree on the general point that things have improved drastically but this guy is a little overly optimistic for my taste. For one thing, some of his numbers are whack. He claims that the the former FDA Commissioner claims that we will be at 250 vaccination doses by the end of March. Slow down cowboy. What he actually said was this.
Gottlieb said the new administration has "made a lot of progress" with vaccine distribution, delivering as many as 2 million vaccine doses on some days. He predicted by the end of March, there will be 250 million vaccines delivered onto the market if the one-dose coronavirus vaccine from Johnson & Johnson receives an authorization for emergency use by the FDA, with another 100 million vaccines delivered in April.
"If you assume a 60-40 split between first doses and second doses, you assume about 60% of the supply that's coming onto the market is going to first doses. By the end of March, we'll have delivered 150 million vaccines and in April, another 60 million," he said. "We're going to run out of demand. I mean, I think we need to start thinking about the demand side of this equation soon."
So he overstated the vaccine in arms number in that prediction by 100 million. And the lower number seems accurate. We are at about 60 million so far with about 40 days to go until March 31. We have to average more than 2 million a day to get to hit 150 million when we are averaging about 1.7 now. I think we can hit that number but not the 250. We would have to average nearly triple our current output to hit that. Bear in mind that Biden only promised 100 million by the end of April. He later changed that to 150 million. But hitting 150 million at the end of March would still be beating this projection by 30 days. Getting to 250 million in that reduced time frame is not on anybody's radar.
I can't really speak to the natural immunity within people who have already had it. The problem is that nobody can. I suspect that it is greater than expected but not foolproof or predictable. He is making a huge leap by saying those who have had it bad enough to get tested have some level of immunity and extrapolating that to the people that never got tested. I think that could be a flaw in logic since there is no guarantee that those presumably milder cases would garner the same antibody response in the patient.
The bottom line is I think he is right overall but about 4-6 weeks ahead of schedule. I do think we are going to be in really great shape by end of April or middle of May.
Meanwhile, I lost another colleague this week. Early forties with young kids. It is too early to declare victory. We are doing better but that just means that we have improved from atrocious to bad. We need to be patient because letting down our guard too early will just drag it out and make it worse.
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