Denmark’s infectious diseases agency says that vaccination will not lead to herd immunity, and that Covid-19 will circulate for years to come.
Talking to the newspaper BT, the acting academic director of State Serum Institute Tyra Grove Krause said, “It is not realistic to achieve herd immunity, understood as meaning that we will not see any spread of infection at all.”
However, Krause is hopeful that the breaks of Covid-19, while coming in waves, was not going to be as serious as before.
Krause also said that the Delta strain also does not seriously threaten the vaccination programme, because there is “still a high level of protection against the disease left”.
According to her, this is in line with the purpose of the vaccines: “to prevent serious disease, not to eliminate viruses”.
The real question according to Krause is how long the vaccines will remain effective.
Elsewhere, Iceland says that it has reached the same conclusion that vaccination hasn’t led to the herd immunity experts had hoped for.
Iceland’s chief epidemiologist Thórólfur Gudnason said that there are only two ways to develop herd immunity: the spread of the infection itself and vaccination.
In the past several weeks, the Delta variant has exceeded all others in Iceland, one of the most vaccinated nations in Europe, breaking previous infection records and making it clear that vaccinated people may easily contract and spread it as well.
Earlier experts estimated that the possibility of herd immunity was something that would happen to 60 to 70 percent of the population. Now, however, that has changed.
Herd immunity means that enough people are immune to infection from an illness that its reproduction number or R-rate – the number of people each infected person infects – falls below one, without any other anti-infection measures in place.
The Delta Strain is more adept at dodging vaccines and challenges the possibility of herd immunity at that rate.
Iceland, a nation of 330,000 has seen over 8,700 cases and 30 deaths. Denmark, a nation of 5.8 million, has seen 323,000 cases and 2,500 deaths.
