When will it end? COVID and the realistic expectations of vaccine herd immunity.

When the US and its wealthy partners want to get things done, they get things done. As of today, the world has issued 4.7 Million COVID vaccines from the joint Moderna and Pfizer stocks, along with another million vaccines in China and Russia. Within that number, the US has issued 2.3 Million vaccines to Americans. Therefore currently, there is over 2 million people in the US with at least one dose of the vaccine.

If earlier exposure to COVID supplies immunity, we can expect that roughly 14 million people in the US have some sort of immunity right now, whether from recovery or receiving at least one of the vaccine shots. That is 4% of the population. However, it takes two doses of the vaccine to achieve 95% effectiveness in both the mRNA vaccines. We need to get to 51% of the population vaccinated to begin defeating the disease and 70% to declare the pandemic over for good.

Assuming nothing changes, meaning we only have Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccine for the foreseeable future, we in the US should reach 51% immunity sometime in the late summer to early fall. When combining the efforts of both companies, it is believed 2.3 billion vaccines will be produced globally over the next year.

However, there are two more vaccines awaiting approval coming from AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson (J&J).

AstraZeneca’s may be approved this week in the UK. Once it is cleared, AstraZeneca said it can provide another 2.9 billion vaccines globally in 2021, with roughly 100 million slated for the US, although there is no word on when their vaccine will receive FDA emergency approval in the US.

J&J’s vaccine is taking longer to study as they have just started phase 3 trials, but with good reason. It is the only vaccine being studied with children as potentially future candidates. Although COVID is relatively mild among the child population, getting them vaccinated does help lower overall transmission rates. J&J’s adult variant is slated for approval in the Spring and the child variant possibly coming later in 2021. Johnson and Johnson said they can produce 1 billion vaccines in 2021.

So, the joint efforts of the four major COVID vaccine producers means the world can expect to receive roughly 6.2 billion doses from those four companies in 2021. That covers 3.6 billion people. These numbers do not count the Russian and Chinese vaccines. Nonetheless, estimates put the total number administered between China and Russia to be around 1 million doses to date with officially unknown effectiveness, but unofficially promising results. There are other companies developing vaccines, as well. France’s Sanofi is partnered with GlaxoSmithKline in developing a vaccine, but that vaccine isn’t slated to be ready until at least Summer of 2021, if not later.

So, what does this mean?

If you live in a wealthy nation that took part in and funded the vaccine studies, such as the US, the UK, Canada, and Germany did, you likely will return to relative pre-COVID normal in the late summer of 2021 or maybe sooner.

With AstraZeneca and J&J coming online in the next few weeks to months, it is expected that the US could administer as many as 60 million vaccines to 30 million people per month as early as March. Right now, it looks like 40 million Americans will receive both doses by March. The US population is about 330 million, the adult population is 260 million. We would cross the 51% total population (roughly 170 million) threshold in June, and 70% immunity in August. This assumes that there are 230 million adults willing to get the vaccine or have gained immunity naturally through recovering from COVID.

Unfortunately, for the rest of the world, especially in developing nations, it may take as long as two years to get a consistent global vaccine distribution program going. Perhaps longer if this vaccine requires an annual booster like with the flu, though no data on whether that will be a requirement is available. However, adding Sanofi, Novavax, China’s Sinovax, and other minor players to the field of possible suppliers makes things better. In the meantime, masks and social distancing will be the norm, at least until Summer for developed nations and much longer for developing nations.