NY Times, Sept. 29, 2020
Trump Allies Say the Virus Has Almost Run Its Course. ‘Nonsense,’
Experts Say.
The C.D.C. and leading experts have concluded, using different
scientific methods, that as many as 90 percent of Americans are still
vulnerable to infection.
By Donald G. McNeil Jr.
In the last week, leading epidemiologists from respected institutions
have, through different methods, reached the same conclusion: About 85
to 90 percent of the American population is still susceptible to
SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the current pandemic.
The number is important because it means that “herd immunity” — the
point at which a disease stops spreading because nearly everyone in a
population has contracted it — is still very far off.
The evidence came from antibody testing and from epidemiological
modeling. At the request of The New York Times, three epidemiological
teams last week calculated the percentage of the country that is
infected. What they found runs strongly counter to a theory being
promoted in influential circles that the United States has either
already achieved herd immunity or is close to doing so, and that the
pandemic is all but over. That conclusion would imply that businesses,
schools and restaurants could safely reopen, and that masks and other
distancing measures could be abandoned.
“The idea that herd immunity will happen at 10 or 20 percent is just
nonsense,” said Dr. Christopher J.L. Murray, director of the University
of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which
produced the epidemic model frequently cited during White House news
briefings as the epidemic hit hard in the spring.
That belief began circulating months ago on conservative news programs
like those of Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham. It has been cited
several times by Dr. Scott W. Atlas, President Trump’s new pandemic
adviser. It appears to be behind Mr. Trump’s recent remarks that the
pandemic is “rounding the corner” and “would go away even without the
vaccine.”
But it is also gaining credence on Wall Street and among some business
executives, said prominent public health experts, who consider the idea
scientifically unfounded as well as dangerous; its most vocal adherents
are calling for mask-wearing and social distancing to end just as cold
weather is shifting social activity indoors, where the risk of
transmission is higher.
Even in places where the pandemic hit especially hard — a French
aircraft carrier, the Brazilian city of Manaus, the slums of Mumbai and
a neighborhood in Queens, N.Y. — infections did not noticeably slow down
until almost 60 percent of the inhabitants were infected. And even those
levels may not suffice, given that cases are increasing again in Brazil
and in Brooklyn areas that had seen cases spike and then drop off.
“Immunity in 2020 is no closer to being just around the corner than
prosperity was in 1930,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director
of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The route to
immunity without a vaccine would be through graveyards filled with
hundreds of thousands of Americans who did not have to die.”
In April, in an opinion piece for The Hill that endorsed letting the
virus circulate, Dr. Atlas cited the conventional wisdom that herd
immunity requires that about 60 percent of people have antibodies. But
last week he said on “The Ingraham Angle” that “most of the immunity for
this virus is felt to be due to T-cell immunity” and speculated that
such immunity was why children rarely became dangerously ill and why
Asian countries did well against the virus.
The calculations that 85 to 90 percent of all Americans are vulnerable
come from numerous sources.
On Friday, the C.D.C., citing still-unreleased data from blood samples
collected at commercial laboratories across the country this summer,
said that less than 10 percent of samples contained antibodies to the virus.
Also on Friday, in a study published in The Lancet, Stanford University
scientists examined 28,500 blood samples from dialysis centers in 46
states and found antibodies in just over 9 percent.
And the epidemic-modeling teams, at the request of the Times, used their
models to calculate what percentage of the country is infected; the
models were based not on blood sampling but on testing and death data
from all 50 states.
Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist who has been advising the Trump
administration’s coronavirus response, has argued that “people have
immunity, even people that didn’t get the infection.” Credit...Anna
Moneymaker for The New York Times
Dr. Murray’s institute estimated that 29 million Americans, or 9 percent
of the population, have had the virus. The Prevention Policy Modeling
Lab at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health estimated the figure
at 41 million, or 12.5 percent.
Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center
for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, said his team believed it
was 10 to 12 percent. The Covid-19 Projections website consulted by
Resolve to Save Lives, Dr. Frieden’s health advocacy initiative,
calculated it at 16 percent.
Each model “has its warts” because they use slightly different
assumptions about fatality rates and test accuracy, said Nicolas A.
Menzies, a collaborator at the Harvard modeling lab. But all reach
similar conclusions: Although some parts of the country were heavily
infected in the spring — more than 20 percent of residents of the New
York metropolitan area are believed to be immune, for example — the
average across the country is far lower.
More than 200,000 Americans have already died, and models estimate that
if people return to old habits, such as gathering indoors without masks,
more than 300,000 and possibly 400,000 could die before a vaccine is
widely available.
The chief proponents of the idea that herd immunity is somehow close at
hand are American and European medical professionals who oppose
lockdowns. They contend that most people in the world are immune to the
virus thanks to “T-cell immunity” derived from having contracted common
colds that were caused by the four relatively benign coronaviruses that
have circulated for years.
But this theory is unfounded. Helper T-cells are white blood cells that,
once “primed” by an initial infection, can linger in the tissues for
decades until they meet the same virus again and destroy it, by
triggering the production of antibodies and by summoning other
virus-killers.
(Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology,
offered the metaphor of a Lego car. Antibodies recognize the car’s
outline and attach themselves, disabling it. But T-cells recognize
individual Lego blocks, even internal ones. If the car is already parked
inside a human airway cell, for instance, the cell can effectively wave
a car part around to attract the attention of primed helper T-cells,
which in turn can recruit “killer T-cells” to inject toxic proteins that
wipe out both garage and car.)
The immunity conferred by a common cold coronavirus appears to last a
year or two, immunologists say, and then a person can catch the same
cold again. Antibodies against it fade away; primed T-cells remain.
Primed T-cells may lower the odds of dying from the new, dangerous
coronavirus, Dr. Crotty said, but that has not been proven. There is no
evidence that they protect against becoming infected with it.
The experts who promote the theory that primed T-cells even stop
infections typically are not immunologists. Dr. Atlas, a radiologist,
has argued on Fox News since July that “people have immunity, even
people that didn’t get the infection.” Dr. James Todaro, an
ophthalmologist and, like Dr. Atlas, an early advocate of
hydroxychloroquine, has echoed that idea. In Britain, a leading
proponent of the theory is Dr. Senetra Gupta, a theoretical
epidemiologist at Oxford University.
During a congressional hearing last week, Senator Rand Paul, a former
eye surgeon, engaged in a heated exchange on the topic with Dr. Anthony
S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert. The senator
argued that New York’s outbreak slowed because of T-cell immunity. Dr.
Fauci quickly countered: “If you believe 22 percent is herd immunity, I
believe you’re alone in that.”
In a later interview, Dr. Fauci said that he “knew of no scientific
evidence” that common cold-derived T-cells protect against infection
with SARS-CoV-2. Furthermore, he added, any contention that the pandemic
was dying out “makes absolutely no sense at all.”
Senator Rand Paul had a heated exchange with Dr. Anthony Fauci last
week. “If you believe 22 percent is herd immunity, I believe you’re
alone in that,” Dr. Fauci said.Credit...Pool photo by Alex Edelman
Possibly the most detailed version of the unfounded theory was made in a
37-minute video posted to YouTube on Sept. 8 by Ivor Cummins; it has
received 1.4 million views.
Mr. Cummins, a chemical engineer who typically posts videos about diet
and heart disease, used numerous slides of cases and deaths to argue
that the epidemic had “largely ended” by June in Europe and by late
summer in the United States.
The virus, he said, harmed the 20 percent who were vulnerable, whereas
“80 percent are already de facto immune through cross-immunity, T-cell
mucosal immunity from prior coronaviruses.” Masks and lockdowns had
little impact, he claimed, despite abundant evidence from conventional
scientists. “Sorry, guys” he added, with a note of disdain. “Science is
tough that way.”
Dr. Murray said he was amazed at how many people had seen the video.
“I’m getting calls about this hokey theory all the time from heads of
major consulting companies, C.E.O.s, asking me, ‘Is this video right?’
I’m going to make a video debunking it.”
Cases were already rising in Europe when Mr. Cummins posted his video.
He dismissed those as cases of “dead virus” found by intensive testing —
a supposition that was soon proved hollow when hospitalizations, too,
began to rise.
The video concluded with a hedge: Although the epidemic was over, Mr.
Cummins claimed, Europe might have a winter wave of deaths during which
“SARS-CoV-2 might dominate and kick out the influenza deaths.”
In Spain and Britain, public health officials believe that the winter
wave has already begun, and have reimposed partial lockdowns.
The assumption that T-cells primed by common colds offer protection
against SARS-CoV-2 is “completely speculative,” said Dr. Crotty of La
Jolla, who was a co-author of the first study to show that primed
T-cells exist in stored blood. “It’s possible they help. It’s possible
they don’t do anything. And it’s possible they are harmful.”
So, he said, the claim that 50 percent of Americans have prior immunity
and 20 percent have been immunized by infection, so therefore 70 percent
herd immunity has been reached, as Mr. Cummins and Senator Paul have
suggested, “is convenient arithmetic, but it’s just wrong arithmetic.”
He added, “Wearing a mask is much more effective than hoping you and the
people around you have pre-existing T-cell memory.”
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#2092): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/2092
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/77218276/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
