We should see a, ‘level of herd immunity by June, July’: Doctor

Dr. James McDeavitt, Senior Vice President and Dean of Clinical Affairs at Baylor College of Medicine, joined Yahoo Finance Live to break down his thoughts of the CDC Chief's warning of the 'impending doom' due to a spike in COVID-19 cases.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: We want to bring in Dr. James McDeavitt. He is the Senior Vice President and Dean of Clinical Affairs at Baylor College of Medicine. And Dr. McDeavitt, it's great to have you on the program here.

So let's talk about the rise that we're seeing in the number of cases, also the number of deaths, yet we're vaccinating more and more people. I believe the CDC out today saying that 147 million doses have been administered so far in the US. What's your perspective just on where we stand right now? Could we be looking at the start of another surge?

JAMES MCDEAVITT: Well, I think at this point, you have to decide if you're going to be an optimist or a pessimist. And we had the CDC Director talk about a sense of impending doom yesterday the same time we had the former FDA Director say that he felt that we were reaching a turning point with vaccinations.

I'm more inclined to think we're reaching a turning point. And there are really two competing factors. We've got the emergence of the new variants, particularly the UK variant, which is becoming predominant, is more infectious, that's driving that infectivity rate up and starting to increase our cases. At the same time, we're doing a great job of vaccinating people, 2.5 million people a day, something like 30%, or approaching 30%, of US citizens getting at least one vaccination. So we're on track to herd immunity. So that's that that's sort of driving the numbers down.

And then balance against that, we started to relax our restrictions and our asking practices and spring break, et cetera. I think that's going to put upward pressure on those numbers. So it's a balance of those two. Overall, I'm optimistic.

ADAM SHAPIRO: You're optimistic. It's good to hear optimism. But let's break this down a bit. If you've been vaccinated, we're being told that, at least with the UK variant, you probably have some protection. And in places where we're seeing dramatic increases in positive cases, are we also seeing dramatic increases in hospitalization and deaths, or is that holding steady? Because that would indicate then perhaps that vaccinations are working really well, right?

JAMES MCDEAVITT: Right. So there's been a little bit of a disconnect. And that's true I think we are seeing some positive effect. If you look at 80-year-olds, for example, in January, 80-year-olds had a high rate of hospitalization and a high rate of death. 80-year-olds have very low rates of death and hospitalization at this point. So we vaccinated at-risk populations I think very effectively.

When you look at my numbers in Houston, we've seen a stable case rate of about 1,000 new cases a day for about the past month, yet we've seen our hospitalizations continue to slowly drift downward. So I think we're seeing sort of stabilization of new case rates, but the people that are getting infected may be less prone to wind up in a hospital, which, again, is good news. If we can keep our hospitals protected until we reach herd immunity, that will hopefully keep us out of crisis.

SEANA SMITH: Doctor, what do you make of the debate of one dose, you should distribute that to everyone possible before administering that second dose? Because we just got that CDC report saying that the vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer, they're 80% effective in preventing COVID after that first dose. Does that then support-- it sounds like it does-- but support the argument that maybe we should just be focusing on that one dose before we get people fully vaccinated?

JAMES MCDEAVITT: Well, I don't think we have to argue. And think about how quickly this has progressed. We've been in the vaccination business here since mid-December. We all panicked early January because we weren't getting vaccinations into people's arms and we had aspirational goals of maybe we can get to a million people a day or 100 million people in 100 days. Well, pretty soon we eclipsed that. We're at 1.5 and then 2 and now 2.5 million per day.

So we're on track now to reach what should be a level of herd immunity by June, July, at this pace. And we've got good science to support the two-dose regimen. So I would not veer off script at this point. I think we can stick with the conventional vaccination schedule and get to where we need to be pretty quickly.