ICAP’s founder and global director Wafaa El-Sadr, MD, MPH, MPA was quoted in a recent publication in NY’s Newsday on the new COVID-19 milestone of herd immunity. As vaccine distribution efforts gain traction around the world, medical experts fear more contagious variants of the virus may complicate efforts to reach herd immunity, and achieving it depends on other unknowns — such as how effective vaccines are in preventing transmission and how many Americans will remain reluctant to take the vaccine.
“The better vaccines you have, the lower the percentage of the population you need to have vaccinated for population immunity,” said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University in Manhattan. Although the vaccines are highly effective in preventing serious disease, it’s still unknown how effective they are in stopping virus transmission, El-Sadr said.
