Dr. Fauci, Tear Off These Masks: If the epidemic continues on its current course, it will be safe to uncover your face by Memorial Day

By Nicole Saphier She is a physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. Excerpts:

"once immunity has kicked in, the vaccinated are at negligible risk of being infected, never mind spreading infection. If you’ve been vaccinated, there’s almost no direct safety benefit—to yourself or others—of wearing a mask. You still have to do so only because immunity is invisible. The expectation or requirement of mask-wearing is impracticable to impose only on those who are vulnerable or may be dangerous.

At some point, however, herd immunity is achieved: Enough of the population is immune to make the risk of infection minimal in the population as a whole. Anthony Fauci puts the threshold for herd immunity at full vaccination of 85% of the U.S. population, including children. Since the vaccine has been authorized only for patients 16 and older and not all adults are willing to accept it, Dr. Fauci’s goal almost certainly won’t be reached for another year, if ever. The current figure is only 17% of total population.

Dr. Fauci’s benchmark is unreasonably high. He ignores that many unvaccinated Americans—perhaps as many as 120 million, as seroprevalence studies suggest true incidence levels to be three to 20 times captured infections—have immunity owing to prior infection. A recent large-scale Danish study finds that prior infection provides approximately 80% protection to patients younger than 65 and 47% protection to those older."

"Because of this combination of factors, we will likely surpass 50% combined immunity within the next week or two."

"A single dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccine has been shown to confer 80% immunity after two weeks according to recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data on healthcare workers. A British study showed people who were immunized after infection had 99% protection after a single dose. This means any of the 99 million Americans—38% of adults—who have received at least one dose may be sufficiently protected. At the current pace, 50% of the entire population could receive a single shot by the third week of April if efforts focus on the unvaccinated instead of those who’ve already had one shot. If combined with continued lower rates of infection and death, I believe that would be enough to justify an end to mask-wearing outside high-risk settings."

"officials have recommended getting the vaccine regardless of prior immunity and haven’t kept track of whether people receiving the vaccine already had a documented infection or presence of antibodies conferring probable natural immunity."