Vaccines are doing fine
Yep. They're doing a great job. In the UK we are currently in a third wave of cases from the delta variant, but thanks to the vaccines hospitalisations and deaths are very low.not everyone one want to get vaccinated, there are countries in Europe with very low % vaccines and IMO never going to reach herd immunity.
Anti-vaxxers are an obstacle to herd immunity, yes, but I do think some of them will change their minds as there are geographical clusters of high vaccine hesitancy (e.g. Alabama in the US), which will quickly become apparent in the data... if people see that highly-vaccinated parts of the country have lower case numbers and better outcomes, it should cause a degree of behavioural change. If anti-vaxxers form a small enough minority, then effective herd immunity within a nation is perfectly feasible. The other issue is the low availability of the vaccine in poorer nations... the higher the amount of virus circulating anywhere in the world, the higher the number of mutations, and dangerous or vaccine-resistant mutations. So it's likely that we will need annual boosters to compensate for concerning variants. As for 'beating' Covid, that's only going to happen when cases numbers across the whole world start to drop to very low levels.
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