Look, Jack, Americans are going to meet long before July 4th.

Look, Jack, Americans are going to meet long before July 4th.

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Biden knows this, though, right? The reason he targeted July 4 as a day when Americans might get together with friends and braai is not because he thinks it will take so long to be somewhat normal. This was partly for symbolism (‘we declare our independence from the virus!’) And partly because his habit with the pandemic is to deliver too little and deliver too much. He has never abandoned his goal of administering 100 million doses in the first 100 days, although it was clear during Inauguration Day, with the US already reaching the mark, that we would reach the target easily.

Remember that even governors in the blue states like Larry Hogan and Andrew Cuomo have started reopening * big places * like Camden Yards with limited capacity. By the time July walks around, some may be at full capacity. There will no doubt be mass gatherings on Independence Day this year to watch fireworks, and perhaps not exclusively in red states. Biden just wants to set the standard for returning as normal as possible to make it childish for his team to clean it up – and of course to manage expectations in the event that a black-swan variant emerges against the vaccination to to complicate things. .

Go to 2:55 here and watch Gottlieb throw another truth bomb in the debate over relaxing precautions. Vaccines will relax their precautions, no matter how “the debate” goes, he says correctly:

Look at this:

We will have vaccinated 50 percent by early May at a rate of 1.43 million doses per day – but we are far ahead of that rate, with an average of 2.2 million doses over the past seven days. And of course, a significant portion of the population has already been immunized by contracting the virus and recovering from it, which means that the actual population immunity will be higher than 50 percent on the day we reach the vaccine milestone. Herd immunity can start by April somewhere. And certainly, with so many vaccinations of senior citizens, the risk of hospitals being overwhelmed by a new wave would have almost disappeared by that time.

Things are currently looking so good that even the blue state of Michigan, led by Gretchen Whitmer, is preparing to give “fairness” considerations to prioritize the vaccine and open it to everyone within a few weeks:

Michiganders celebrate July 4 however they want.

When our friends in Europe can go on holiday en masse again is another matter, as Italy, Germany and France are currently each plagued with increasing business. Italy is looking at another exclusion around Easter and German scientists say a “third wave” has already begun in their country, with more restrictions soon. Why? This is partly because the British variant is wild, but partly also because they struggle with vaccinations. Here’s how they behave in the US in cumulative vaccinations per capita:

We’re about three times better. Measured by the current moving average of seven days, we are twice as fast. I wonder how scenes from the US and UK are going to return to normal on the continent this summer. Hopefully this will lead to less hesitation with vaccines among Europeans, but I wonder if there will not also be political consequences for governments over the slow pace.

I leave you with this grim story, which is characteristic of the media. This is strictly untrue: the only way to ‘end’ COVID is to vaccinate the planet, which will not happen any time soon. As long as there are populations where the virus can spread, there is a risk that a variant will emerge that could defeat the current vaccines. But the pandemic as we know it will end here by the summer, and the developers of mRNA vaccines need to be able to adapt quickly to the variants as it emerges and provides Americans with boosters. The pandemic is not ‘over’, but it is over.

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