It seems that everyone wants to vaccinate 100% of the people in the UK so Britons can feel safe, AND ONLY THEN, send surplus UK vaccines to developing nations to help them beat COVID-19. Which sounds reasonable on the face of it. After all, why should Britons risk thousands more deaths in the country in order to help others who live oceans away from the UK?

However, this is a false narrative and any epidemiologist worth their salt will tell you so…

By Vaccinating Only 64% of a Given Population, You Effectively Prevent Re-Transmission of the Virus

Yes, it’s a fact. If you live in the UK, Australia, or Canada (for three easy examples) and your healthcare system has vaccinated 64% of the population against a virus, they’ve effectively beaten that virus. Forever!

“How can that be?” you ask.

It’s because the remaining 36% of the population AREN’T riding in the same elevator. Obviously.

Further, within that 36% group, responsible adults these days are wearing a face mask and washing their hands frequently.

Additionally, many people in that 36% cohort have already had the virus — either knowingly or asymptomatically — therefore, they can neither catch COVID-19 nor pass it on to other people. That’s important to know. Which may turn out to be the best immunity of all, because that’s how nature has been saving us from pathogens for millennia and the proof it works is that there’s now 7.8 billion of us on planet Earth.

Of course, this assumes that entry to the UK is restricted to those who’ve either had the virus or received a vaccination — in either case, they aren’t able to re-transmit the Coronavirus to Britons.

However, EVEN IF the borders were thrown wide open, once you’ve vaccinated 64% of the population in the country it’s almost impossible for the re-transmission of COVID-19 to occur because many of the non-vaccinated 36% of Britons will have already had the disease (making it impossible for them to either catch or re-transmit COVID-19) or will be wearing masks and washing their hands frequently (making it almost impossible for them to either catch or re-transmit COVID-19) or those Britons will never come into close contact with visitors from another country (who WON’T have COVID-19 because they were properly screened before they boarded an aircraft to carry them to the UK)

Ergo, the chances of Coronavirus-infected visitors to the UK infecting Britons with COVID-19 are almost nil once 64% of Britons have been vaccinated.

Why Doesn’t the NHS Vaccinate 64% of Britons & Then Send the Surplus Vaccine to Developing Nations?

So obviously, that’s the thing to do!

Once the UK hits the magic number of 64% of Britons vaccinated — and with continued screening at the country’s borders for potentially infected visitors, and with proper mask-wearing and proper hand-washing for Britons, there’s no reason for ‘lockdown’ to continue, for closed ports of entry to the UK, or for quarantining of visitors to the UK — the rest of the UK vaccine supply can then be re-routed to developing nations that are members of the Commonwealth of Nations.

In that way, next year’s UK farm workers (many of whom hail from Commonwealth nations) will have been vaccinated courtesy of UK Foreign Aid, thereby helping to keep the UK’s food production safe and able to meet demand uninterrupted throughout the UK’s extended harvest season.

By making surplus vaccines available to those developing Commonwealth nations, the UK protects its home-grown food production and can credit the value of those vaccines against the UK Aid budget as a payment-in-kind, thereby helping to maintain the UK’s committent to spend .7% of its GDP on foreign aid.

And that’s the way it’s done people! Stick with science AND help developing nations to vaccinate their people — some of whom will be picking your fruit and veg in the coming months. Think about it…

Written by John Brian Shannon

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• Vaccine optimization for COVID-19: Who to vaccinate first? (ScienceMag.org)