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Comment by rekabis | Hacker News Reader

> You can't get herd immunity from vaccination with a virus like corona. This was known from the beginning. It mutates too fast.

There was a three or four month window, right when the vaccines were first released, when a 95+% implementation of the initial vaccine shot could have produced a reasonably close facsimile of herd immunity, such that it would have made it several orders more difficult for the virus to effectively mutate. It could have conceivably cut the subsequent death toll in half, if not more.

Unfortunately, politics and antivaxx disinformation got in the way of that. And people continued to die in droves due to selfishness and lies.

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No, you couldn't have physically deployed it faster than it mutates. Need at least six months and like you say, only had 3-4.

What physical limit do you mean? There are lots of things that are deployed by the billions on short time scales. Seasonal foods or fresh flowers are an example of how feasible it can be to deliver billions of Xs around the world in weeks.

Math. You need to jab it into every other arm in the planet in less than four months.

You are making numerous claims throughout this thread without a single citation.

Where can I find a study that supports this: "There was a three or four month window, right when the vaccines were first released, when a 95+% implementation of the initial vaccine shot could have produced a reasonably close facsimile of herd immunity, such that it would have made it several orders more difficult for the virus to effectively mutate. It could have conceivably cut the subsequent death toll in half, if not more.

Unfortunately, politics and antivaxx disinformation got in the way of that. And people continued to die in droves due to selfishness and lies."

Simply remember what happened. No citation needed.

lolol, "There was a three or four month window, right when the vaccines were first released, when a 95+% implementation of the initial vaccine shot could have produced a reasonably close facsimile of herd immunity, such that it would have made it several orders more difficult for the virus to effectively mutate. It could have conceivably cut the subsequent death toll in half, if not more."

This is a statement that has many claims: 1. 95% implementation (whatever that means) in a specified time window of initial vaccine could've produced herd immunity 2. This herd immunity would've made it "several orders of more difficult" for the virus to mutate 3 The estimate of a 50% reduction in death toll.

I certainly can't remember something that didn't happen, herd immunity that *would've made mutation more difficult" or a "50% reduction" that didn't happen.

Your memory must be better than mine, it remembers statistics and estimates from counterfactual events.

Agreed, though it would have been necessary to deploy the vaccines globally, especially in the least-wealthy parts of the world.

In the case of Omicron, there's a good chance that the vaccines would have needed to reach a community in Botswana ahead of the initiation of the chronic infection that may have produced BA.1, BA.2, etc.

First-world extensive deployments would have killed off the first-world propagation of variants through Delta in short order, but everything changed with Omicron.

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