Delta’s gift is hybrid immunity
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4 min read . Updated: 21 Aug 2021, 01:52 PM IST - One senator at a time, a new variant is bracing up our vaccinated immune systems against new Covid
, Covid-19, CoronaviPolitics is how we govern ourselves, so don’t imagine Covid data could ever have been unpoliticized. The CDC’s naming this week of a new analytics panel, featuring Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch and John Hopkins’s Caitlin Rivers, does not change this reality. It opens a new chapter.
How so? From the start, our mistake has been our strange reticence to recognize the reality of mild or symptomless Covid. It began on day one with the World Health Organization and certain experts choosing to exaggerate Covid’s deadliness by ignoring mild and unseen cases. The same myopia continues to play havoc today with our ability to answer a crucial question: How rampant is the Delta variant among the vaccinated? The U.S. is hopelessly trying to draw conclusions from unrepresentative data.
In the Massachusetts outbreak that set off government alarm bells, more than 300 vaccinated holiday-makers later tested positive. Were they 100% or 1% of those who returned home with the virus? No idea.
In Chicago, 127 of 203 cases associated with the Lollapalooza music festival were fully vaccinated people. Same question. Are they the tip or the whole iceberg? No clue.
With more young Covid victims landing in hospitals, is this because Delta is more virulent or because there’s a lot more Delta than we know? Again, your government doesn’t have the foggiest.
Now three more vaccinated U.S. senators have come down with Covid this week.
This chosen myopia about unseen spread has proved costly but in ways that hint at its political utility. In January 2020, we could tell ourselves Covid wasn’t here because we hadn’t detected any cases. Later, when the pandemic was in full swing, overplaying the death risk and underplaying natural immunity helped to rally support for lockdowns, masking and vaccine rollout compliance.
Still, why would scientists like Anthony Fauci and CDC leaders be satisfied with inadequate data? One reasonable presumption is that people don’t ask questions they don’t want the answers to. From the start, our public-health experts were realistic, not to say fatalistic, about the virus. The CDC on its webpage for months advised that every American should expect to be infected eventually. This advice disappeared only as political messaging became paramount. Accentuating how much viral spread remained unobserved and unmeasured apparently did not fit the agenda.
Delta has made such motivated myopia no longer sustainable. The Covid-causing virus is a single-strand RNA virus—i.e., prone to frequent mutation, like the flu, which requires a new vaccine every year.
The public is being hit with absurdly late-to-the-news headlines saying Covid won’t be going away. Its favorite media-approved epidemiologists now warn that everyone must get it sooner or later. Harvard’s Michael Mina breaks the news that not the worst thing right now is vaccinated people getting asymptomatic Delta infections—a “booster" shot against future variants likely to be as robust as any the government will be handing out.
And more absurd than ever is social-media censorship of experts who say anything slightly complicated about masks or vaccine hesitancy, as if their discordant thoughts must still be suppressed in the name of eliminating Covid forever.
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This propaganda is now detrimental to the real goal. The coming surprise for Americans is that hybrid immunity, or vaccination plus inevitable exposure to an evolving virus, is our new way out. As much as it was right to try to soften this adjustment, look at Japan today, with Tokyo hospitals near collapse under the weight of a Delta outbreak. Look at New Zealand, an entire nation locked down over what was initially a single Delta case. These countries have yet to find a way to make peace with the virus and allow natural immunity to play its role in domesticating a new and unwelcome guest that won’t be going away. China will be the ultimate case study: facing Delta with a billion-plus people who are immunologically naive or reliant on inferior vaccines.
If you think nongovernment scientists were immune to the motivated myopia about unseen spread, read a Washington Post op-ed from just last week by two Boston University epidemiologists. They engage in otherwise interesting herd immunity math based on the garbage-in, garbage-out assumption that only 35 million Americans (the official number) have so far been infected.
Even the CDC has long since emerged from its fog. Its official “tracker" may still emphasize such “reported" cases, but the agency quietly estimates that 120 million Americans had been infected by May 1 in the unseen, unmeasured pandemic that Americans have actually been facing.
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