Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ® and the state’s surgeon general are advising against the use of updated COVID-19 vaccines for anyone under the age of 65, a move that counters a new recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Speaking Wednesday on a panel with other physicians who have cast doubt on the COVID vaccine — including some who lobbied Trump administration officials to back the “herd immunity” theory — Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo expressed concerns over the shot’s safety, saying incorrectly that there was “not a drop of clinical trial data” supporting the vaccines.
“We continue to live in a world where the CDC and the [Food and Drug Administration], when it comes to COVID at least, are just beating their own path in a direction that’s inexplicable in terms of thinking about data and in thinking about common sense,” Ladapo said.
Imagine you have 50 people in a room at a convention or something. Everybody’s greeting and shaking hands and whatnot.
1 of them has the flu and an aversion to covering his mouth when he sneezes ‘cause he’s gross like that.
For simplicity in this thought experiment, we’re gonna assume that this flu transmits instantly, and has zero incubation period. You’re instantly contagious as soon as the sneeze hits you.
Patient 0 sneezes, catching 5 people in his blast zone. Those people each shake hands and or otherwise infect 5 more people. And then they also infect 5 people.
5x5x5 = 125. But we only have 50 people in that room, so it’s pretty safe to say that everybody in the room gets exposed. By the end of the meeting, everybody’s sniffling and sneezing and the whole room is covered in a fine layer of snot.
Now, next meeting. Let’s say that 80% of the people in this meeting have had a flu shot, or have had this particular strain of flu before and are immune.
Our gross patient zero sneezes again, again catching 5 people in his plague spray. But on average, 80% of those people are immune and don’t pass it on like the first room did. Only ONE person gets infected. He sneezes, again catching 5 people. But again, 80% are immune, so only one person gets sick. That person sneezes and catches 5 more. One more sick.
Over the course of the same 1 hour meeting, the unvaccinated room resulted in every single person getting sick. In the 80% vaccinated room, only THREE people got sick. Even though only 80% of people were vaccinated, which is 40 people if there are 50 in the room, only 3 people, which is 6% of our room population, got sick.
20% of 50 people is 10 people. Even though 10 people were unvaccinated, only 3 actually got sick.
That’s the effect of herd immunity. Yes, three still got sick, but because of the level of immunity, some people who are at risk never even get exposed in the first place. As infections go up, even more people become immune, eventually strangling the spread of the sickness off to the point where it can more or less die out completely.
Granted, this is a simplistic example, but that’s basically how it works. If all of the people who CAN get vaccinated do so, then that protects the people who CAN’T get vaccinated for whatever reason, because the sickness never even gets to them thanks to all the other members of the “herd” who are immune.