Johns Hopkins Health Professor: We'll Hit Herd Immunity by April, But 'Experts' Don't Want You to Know That

What if COVID is already much less of a threat than it was throughout 2020? What if the danger it poses is already so diminished, we’re quickly reaching the point where there’s no reason to maintain any restrictions on people’s movement or freedom to gather?

And what if we’re only two months away from the point where we’ve accomplished this?

If the vaunted health “experts” know this, you’d think they’d be very excited to tell us and we’d be very excited to hear about it. It would mean this nightmare is close to being over, and the number of people dying from this virus – which has already plummeted – will soon be statistically insignificant.

What great news! Who wouldn’t be eager to shout it from the rooftops?

Yet according to Dr. Marty Makary, a professor of health at Johns Hopkins University, that is the situation. And the “experts” decidedly do not want you to know about it:

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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.

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. There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection. 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.

Some medical experts privately agreed with my prediction that there may be very little Covid-19 by April but suggested that I not to talk publicly about herd immunity because people might become complacent and fail to take precautions or might decline the vaccine. But scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth. 

Makary’s very optimistic prediction could be wrong, and he acknowledges that. But there are reasons to believe he’s correct, the biggest of which is the fact that the actual COVID infection rate is clearly so much higher than what we measure from “confirmed” cases. The vast majority of COVID cases have only mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. Since most people don’t run and get tested without first showing symptoms, it’s impossible to know how many people have been exposed to the virus and never knew it.

If Makary is correct that testing has only discovered between 10 percent and 25 percent of actual cases, then more than half the country already has antibodies that should provide immunity. (And there are no reported cases of anyone getting infected a second time and having serious symptoms.)

So if you start there, add the 15 percent of the country that’s already been vaccinated (granting that there would be some overlap between the two groups) and then consider we could be close to 40 or 50 percent vaccinated by April, you’re already at herd immunity.

But wait. There’s more. Since the first people being vaccinated are the oldest, and most vulnerable to severe cases that can lead to death, the threat to life at that point is so small that maintaining just about any restrictions whatsoever becomes massive overkill.

Yes, it’s very plausible that we could be at herd immunity by April. Even now, during the winter that Dr. Deborah Birx predicted would be the most devastating event in American history, infections have declined dramatically and the rate of new deaths is following the trend. And most of that decline started even before immunizations kicked into gear.

So if it’s true that many of the “experts” agree with Dr. Makary’s assessment, why don’t they want the public to know? The argument that people will become complacent and stop acting with caution doesn’t show much faith in the public at large. You could just as easily argue that they’ll think, hey, this is working. Let’s do it a couple more months and then it can all be over. Good leadership would encourage that line of thinking.

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But apparently the leadership we have prefers to hide the truth from people. So let me ask you a question: Why should we “follow the science” when the scientists are hiding information from us? And why should we feel confident about public officials “following the science” when they don’t trust us to act responsibly with the information “the science” is generating?

Just about everyone wants this to be over as soon as possible. But does the political class want that? They sure seem reluctant to let go of the power they’ve enjoyed over just about everything for the past year.