[MahomesMagic]

How to End Lockdowns Next Month
Target vaccines to the most vulnerable, and don’t give them to people who have already been infected.

Thanks to Operation Warp Speed, Americans will have enough doses to inoculate 20 million people in December and 30 million more in January. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has rightly put nursing-home residents first in line; 38% of U.S. Covid deaths are connected to those settings. Frontline medical personnel will also receive priority; those who care for the elderly should receive special priority. So should people under 65 who are at severely elevated mortality from Covid-19 infection due to severe chronic disease.

These recommendations should reflect vaccine facts published by Pfizer. The company excluded people who had previously been infected with Covid-19 from its analysis, undoubtedly because natural immunity after recovery is known to be robust, so it expected the vaccine to provide no additional protection for them. Children weren’t part of the vaccine trials and shouldn’t receive the vaccine unless it is proved to be safe for them. Not vaccinating those who have recovered will preserve doses for the vulnerable and still susceptible. Priority should be given based on medical risk, not politics, or else more people will needlessly die.

Some 50 million people in the U.S. are over 65. The number of vaccine doses expected to be available over the next two months will be enough to vaccinate every elderly person who wants to be inoculated, as well as health-care workers and other vulnerable people. With a 90%-plus efficacy rate in protecting against Covid-19 symptoms, we will achieve near-perfect focused protection.

At that point, the lockdown should end immediately and forever. For healthy young and middle-aged people, especially for minorities and the poor, the lockdown’s harm far outstrips the harms from infection.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-..._copyURL_share