Herd immunity needed to end pandemic, hospital says

In a virtual town hall on Tuesday, Dr. Sabrina Kidd, the University of California San Francisco medical director for Sonoma Valley Hospital, provided the latest updates for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kidd spoke for nearly an hour about ongoing cases in Sonoma County, vaccine myths, variant threats, vaccinations for children under 12 and the road map to end the pandemic.

Sonoma County continues to trend ahead of both the country and the state in vaccination rates. Sonoma County has a rate of 75% fully vaccinated, 5 percentage points better than the state and and more than 20 percentage points better than the rest of the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

However, Kidd stressed that case numbers and variants had changed the projections of the threshold for herd immunity.

“Early on, when we looked at this, we were hoping that we can get some sort of herd immunity, with a vaccination rate of say 65% to 75%,” Kidd said. “With the variants and other factors that have come to be, we now know that number needs to be near 100%.”

Kidd focused on vaccines for those under age 12, who can’t yet be vaccinated. Pfizer released the results of a recently completed study on Sept. 20 with children ages 5 to 11 that had positive results.

“In participants 5 to 11 years of age, the vaccine was safe, well tolerated and showed robust neutralizing antibody responses,” the report said.

Kidd said there will be another update about the availability of the Pfizer vaccine for children under 12 by the end of October.

Booster shots were also addressed, with Kidd saying that boosters were not necessary or recommended for healthy individuals but third doses were recommended for the immunocompromised, according to the CDC.

A considerable portion of Kidd’s presentation was to expel some of the ongoing myths about the vaccine, both in regards to their development and rumors about their side effects.

Many people thought development of the MRNA vaccines began in March 2020 with the pandemic, “but it was based on 60 years of research,” Kidd said.

She added that the myth that the MRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna changed DNA was not true, as is the myth that they can make someone infertile.

Kidd noted that while many people may claim religious exemption from the vaccinations, stating that stem cells were used in vaccine development at one point, many global religious organizations still recommended their followers get the vaccine, including the Catholic Church, many Jewish leaders, the Islamic Organization for Medical Sciences, Buddhist leaders, Hindu leaders and the Church of Ladder Day Saints.

She also stressed that individuals who recovered from COVID-19 and had antibodies were still recommended to get the vaccines because medical professionals were unable to determine how long those antibodies would be effective against COVID-19 and its emerging variants.

And until herd immunity is reached, Kidd said, it is still recommended to wear masks in indoor settings and outdoor events with crowds.

“It's really important to decrease the spread, because as I said, more replication leads to more mutations,” Kidd said. “The worst thing we can imagine is vaccine resistance.”

Contact Chase Hunter at chase.hunter@sonomanews.com and follow @Chase_HunterB on Twitter.