Political Quotes

“If you think about it, the herd is h-e-r-d, just like a herd of critters. In this case we talk about humans. If you think about it, Mr. Speaker, your chance of contracting, in this case, a respiratory virus is proportional to the number of people you come in contact with who could spread it to you. Conventional wisdom is that if 60 or 70 percent of the people have had the virus or are immune to the virus, either naturally by having the virus or by having a vaccine, then your chance of contracting it goes way down because your chance of coming in contact with someone who has that virus or is not immune to it has gone way down. You achieve functionally what is called herd immunity; that is, your chance of developing that virus is much, much lower. So it means that you can begin to do some of the things, to draw back on some of those restrictions that we have now that people are so upset with. That is what a vaccine promises to deliver because certainly a percent of the population now has immunity by having had the virus, but a much larger percent will have immunity because they are vaccinated and therefore can't get it nor can spread it to someone else. It is a very important public health concept. It looks like if these vaccines are approved by year end or early next year, by next summer--I tell this to people in my district--we could actually have a normal summer. Wouldn't that be nice? We could actually have a normal summer.”