Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, believes the coronavirus will have “almost completely disappeared” in April.
In an opinion article published by Wall Street Newspaper on Friday, Makary argued that half of the U.S. has already achieved herd immunity because there are more cases of coronavirus in the country, possibly 6.5 times more, than the 28 million that have been reported.
Combined with the 15% of Americans who have already started receiving the vaccine, the doctor argued that normal life will return in the spring.
“There is reason to think that the country is running towards an extremely low level of infection,” wrote Makary. “As more people become infected, most of whom have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all, there are fewer Americans to be infected. In the current trajectory, I hope that COVID will have disappeared in April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.”
Herd immunity has been a controversial issue during the course of the coronavirus pandemic. The term is used to describe what happens when the virus can no longer spread because a large proponent of the population is no longer susceptible.
During the pandemic, some politicians suggested leaving most of society back to normal so that the virus could run its course. But many epidemiologists have repeatedly dismissed the idea, arguing that it is not a defensible plan and pointing to the fact that it would lead to a catastrophic loss of life without any guarantee that immunity would be achieved.
In the USA, more than 490,000 Americans died of COVID-19.
Octavio Jones / Stringer
Markary argued that while the topic of natural immunity has often been rejected by most medical experts due to a lack of data, observational data shows that most Americans may already be protected not only from COVID-19, but also from its new variants.
“But the consistent and rapid decline in daily cases since 8 January can be explained only by natural immunity,” wrote Makary. “Behavior did not suddenly improve during the holidays; Americans traveled more at Christmas than they had since March. Vaccines also do not explain the sharp decline in January. Vaccination rates were low and take weeks to take effect.”
“Many experts, along with politicians and journalists, are afraid to talk about collective immunity. The term has political overtones because some have suggested that the United States simply left COVID to obtain collective immunity. That was a reckless idea,” he added. “But collective immunity is the inevitable result of viral spread and vaccination. When the chain of transmission of the virus has been broken in several places, it is more difficult to spread – and that includes the new strains.”
His views have been challenged by other experts such as the director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Rochelle Wallensky, who said on Wednesday that the United States had not vaccinated enough Americans to achieve collective immunity.
During the briefing, Wallensky attributed the decrease in COVID-19 cases to the lack of trips and large meetings that were more common during the holiday season.
On Thursday, White House COVID adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said he would be well past summer until things were back to “normal”.
Fauci said that if normal means “going back to a situation where you may have cinemas that may be under capacity, that restaurants, indoor meals may be happening, but with moderately reduced capacity,” then “this will be somewhere between fall and end of the year. “
President Joe Biden also discussed a similar schedule to Fauci’s. During CNN City Hall on Tuesday, he said: “As my mother would say, with the grace of God and the goodwill of the neighbors, that next Christmas I think we will be in a very different situation, God willing, than we are today, “
However, Makary continued to defend his views in an interview on Friday with Fox News.
“There is a 76 percent reduction in daily cases in the past six weeks,” said Makary. “You, as a scientist, need to ask why. And we cannot explain this by vaccinated immunity. We cannot explain this by a sudden change in behavior. It is natural immunity and now represents more than 50% of the population.”
Newsweek contacted CDC for further comments, but received no response prior to publication.