Up to 150 million Americans or 45.8% of the U.S. population have been fully vaccinated against COVID. The COVID positivity rate is now at 1.8%. As the nation continues to vaccinate and beat COVID, one health expert believes it's time to announce the end of the pandemic in America.
"The pandemic is really over," Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, told CBN News. "The number of daily cases of COVID are 1/50th the number of daily cases of flu in the middle of a mild flu season."
In his new book titled "The Price We Pay: What Broke American Healthcare and How to Fix It," Dr. Makary argues that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director and White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci "got so many things wrong" during the COVID pandemic and that he lacked "humility," which he believes is "one important thing as a leader in the medical field."
Dr. Makary claims he was the first to write about "universal masking" in response to the COVID pandemic for the New York Times, a concept that he said he never heard from medical leadership. He argued that "it would be helpful to hear [Dr. Fauci] say, 'I got it wrong.'"
In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, Dr. Makary questioned why the medical community, headed by Dr. Fauci, is downplaying natural immunity in favor of experimental vaccines in response to the COVID pandemic. He argued that if natural immunity is not accounted for, the U.S. is far from Dr. Fauci's target of 70% to 85% of the population gaining immunity through the use of vaccines. However, immunity through infections should be taken into consideration.
Dr. Makary explained that in Los Angeles, 45% of city residents already had COVID antibodies in February and when vaccines were made available, the seven-day average of daily COVID cases declined from 15,000 in January to 253 four months later.
A study conducted by researchers at the Washington University in St. Louis showed how following a mild COVID infection, "immune cells were still capable of producing protective antibodies" and that prior COVID infections cause a "robust" and "long-lived humoral immune response."
Another recent study analyzing over 1,300 people who previously had COVID but were unvaccinated showed how none of them became re-infected with COVID, thus leading researchers to conclude that those who were infected with COVID and got better were "unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination."
It is for this reason that Dr. Makary believes that the COVID pandemic is indeed over, for the U.S. at least. He credited this success to natural immunity, which American scientists have failed to study more closely. The John Hopkins School of Public Health professor told CBN News, "It's one of the biggest failures of our medical establishment to dismiss natural immunity. It works. It's durable."
Dr. Makary added that it is now time to declare the end of the COVID pandemic. He argued, "We need to move on. We need to reestablish the human connection. We've got to address the effects of profound loneliness and rebuilding communities."
