“The virus is unlikely to go away,” said Rustom Antia, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta.
The drive for herd immunity — by the summer, some experts once thought possible — captured the imagination of large segments of the public.
Yet vaccinations remain the key to transforming the virus into a controllable threat, experts said.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Biden administration’s top adviser on COVID-19, acknowledged the shift in experts’ thinking.
The concept of reaching herd immunity became the implicit goal in many countries, including the United States.
Most experts, including Fauci, expected that the United States would be able to reach it once vaccines were available.
If the herd immunity threshold is not attainable, what matters most is the rate of hospitalizations and deaths after pandemic restrictions are relaxed, experts believe. »