‘As every day passes, though, that promise of a merry Christmas is more and more looking like one campaign promise made in jest that only the stupids believed in, some 16 million of them, the retired ad man included.’
ABOUTY a week back, I was surprised to notice a reaction to one of my Tweets, one that was simply asking how many vaccinations had been completed on that day. The tweet was accompanied by simple math. I said something like if 70 million Filipinos need to be fully vaccinated to achieve herd immunity — which means jabbed twice; and if we wanted to achieve this by December (about six months away, or about 24 weeks, or about 168 days), and if assuming we’ve fully vaccinated some two million which means we need to fully vaccinate some 68 million more then it meant we need to be vaccinating some 300,000+ people a day, not the 150,000 being reported.
So how many had we vaccinated on that day?
The riposte was a rebuke, directing me to stop using my calculator and hanging on “bad numbers” and telling me to ask the authorities who knew the answers. I was also told that the 150,000 number was an old one, long breached, and that I was simply making all these comments because I, whose opinion no one cared about, was in search of attention.
The comments came from a retired ad agency exec who has been handling the image-building of high officials of this government. Pro bono, for sure.
He was right: the 150,000 vaccinated per day was an old number; last I looked it had again dropped to the 110,000s, but is slowly inching its way back to the 130,000s. The rising and falling numbers are due to the erratic vaccine supply. But whether it is 110,000 or 130,000 or 150,000 these numbers are a far cry from the 200,000-300,000 a day we should be vaccinating now if the oft-repeated promises of our vaccine czars that herd immunity will be reached by Christmas is to be achieved.
Of course, I assume they mean Christmas this year, yes?
As every day passes, though, that promise of a merry Christmas is more and more looking like one campaign promise made in jest that only the stupids believed in, some 16 million of them, the retired ad man included.
There’s a Twitter account (@HerdimmunityPH) that tracks the vaccine rollout in the Philippines, using official numbers coming from official sources. Its latest tweet dated 15 June 2021 estimates that the Philippines will reach herd immunity by January 2024, 2.6 years from now. That’s way, way, way beyond the supposedly merry Christmas the czars have been promising us. (Hmmm…maybe we should take a page from Bolshevik history books on how to deal with failed czars!)
Actually, this “herd immunity” goal is even more problematic than the issue of just when it will be met. If you even doubt that we will meet it at all, you may not be wrong.
As I’ve stated before, herd immunity to be effective at all will require that a certain percentage of the population — some say 70%, some even say 90% — are simultaneously immunized from a certain disease ideally by vaccination but sometimes even by a mix of vaccination and infection (which produces antibodies that render the individual immune).
The need that this big segment of the population is simultaneously immunized is to deny the virus potential hosts in which to multiply and even mutate. It is not achieved when, for example, you immunize 35% of the population this year and another 35% next year, unless the immunity of the first group overlaps that of the second group. But let’s say vaccines against COVID-19 are good only for 12 months. This means if you start vaccinating people in June of this year, you need to make sure that by June next year (ideally earlier) you would have vaccinated the 70% number to “achieve” herd immunity. So the start of the 12-month countdown to 70% should be the day when the first person was vaccinated. If the 70% is achieved more than 12 months after the first person was vaccinated then chances are you haven’t achieved your goal.
So if it will only be by January 2024 that we will hit 70% of our people being vaccinated, this means that anyone and everyone who has received COVID-19 vaccines this year will need to be vaccinated again every year — yes, every year — until January 2024. Remember, this is assuming that the vaccines are good for 12 months.
Here’s another poser: who will pay for the second round of vaccines, or for the booster shots? Will the national government make them available “for free” again to every qualified Filipino, though in reality paid for from the tax monies collected from tax-paying Filipinos?
Or will every Juan now have to dip into his or her own pocket to foot the bill? Will every Juan have that capability?
If it hasn’t yet, let it sink in now. There are now four certainties in the uncertainty of life in the Philippines, and these are death, taxes, political dynasties, and, yes, COVID-19.
It is tempting to add “political promises meant to be broken” but then that’s only for the stupids who believe them, thanks to the admen-enablers who create them!
