Youtube served up a liberal channel with healthcare professionals that were ostensibly criticizing RFKJr – though I feel like they were trying to bothsides the guy, buying into some of his claims they think they agree with. But the issue is that covid vaccine uptake was never great even for the original series, it never reached a point where it would noticeably quell transmission, and most people have not stayed up to date with the latest. In fact, most doctors aren’t recommending the updates, and many people don’t even know about them. Herd immunity in the context of vaccines means that transmission is quelled to the point that people who can’t be vaccinated or who don’t get good results from vaccination, or are otherwise at high risk from breakthrough infections, are protected because transmission has been halted by high uptake of vaccination. This is why vaccine mandates are so important, to set a standard to get as many people vaccinated as who can be.
The youtube healthcare professionals however WRONGLY claimed that the covid vaccines brought herd immunity to the American population and this allowed people to go back to normal life. But the truth is that high risk people have never been abel to go back to normal life, the way that would be true if there was herd immunity from vaccines. The truth is of course that Joe Biden campaigned on actually making that happen, but instead of making that happen, he appointed Jeff Zients, a corporate person to the project, and so the Biden administration caved to right-wing and industry interests, decided it was too hard to promote public health, caved to Republicans when liberals were tricked into being anti-mask by right-wing ad campaigns, presided over the ending of all the popular covid supports, pushed for butts in seats downtown to cater to commercial real estate and fossil fuel, and chose instead to pretend it was a win with the Democratic Party strategy being to prioritize that thing they call The Economy, and to believe that winning over Republicans by trying to out-MAGA the covid contrarians was the answer to ensuring Democratic Party victories while appeasing business interests.
That worked out so well, right? Ugh.
I happen to think it would’ve been better to just be straight with people about how infectious disease and public health works, and garner support and solidarity instead of trying to silence the disabled, seniors, the careful and the immunocompromised, for reminding people that there’s still a problem with our accessibility needs. And how about when market research finds that we aren’t fully engaging in the economy, blame the market, not the people who are choosing not to participate.