PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — One year ago this weekend, the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine was authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Still, infections are still going up, according to an expert who said it's due in part to a large unvaccinated section of the population.
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia said COVID-19 numbers are ticking up now, "not because of omicron, because of delta." He said that's because COVID-19 is a winter virus.
"We're inside more during the winter. We have highly susceptible populations, like young children," he said.
But Offit, who served on the FDA's vaccine advisory committee, expects this surge to be less severe than last year.
"Last year, the peaks were 2,500 deaths a day, 3,000 deaths a day. We're not gonna be there, I think, this year."
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A lot of those affected by the virus, he said, will be children.
"I was on service last week at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and we saw a lot of children who were admitted to the hospital, consistent with the surge of children now," he recalled.
What all of those children had in common, according to Offit, was that none of them were vaccinated.
"None of their parents were vaccinated, none of their siblings were vaccinated, so this is a disease of the willfully unvaccinated," he said.
Right now, Offit said, about 60% of the total U.S. population is vaccinated.
"But that's not enough," he said. "I think we're gonna have to get to the low to mid-90% range of, at least, population immunity, meaning, people who've been naturally infected or vaccinated, or both. We're not there yet. We've hit a wall."
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Initially, he indicated, the bar for herd immunity was lower.
"This virus has continued to mutate, create variants that have become more and more contagious," he explained. "The current circulating strain, the delta strain, has a contagiousness index of between five and nine which is as high as chickenpox, so it's highly contagious. Therefore, you need a greater percentage of the population to be immune."
But even if herd immunity is reached at the ideal 90-95% vaccination rate in the U.S., Offit expects vaccinations will continue to be necessary for the foreseeable future.
"We haven't had a case of natural polio in this country since the late 70s. We do it, because polio still exists in the world in Pakistan, it still exists in Afghanistan," he said.
"We're going to have to have a highly immune population for years, if not decades as long as this virus circulates in the world."