On the plus side for those doubters of the possibility of herd immunity and who only trust the experts, Fauci has just announced that he believes America will reach herd immunity by the end of August or early Fall. I didn't hear his usual qualification, "...it's most likely...", so that is a good sign some of us might actually see the end of the year. 
https://www.whitehouse.gov/2021/03/10/press-briefing-by-white-house-covid-19-response-teamDR. FAUCI: We anticipate — and again, it’s purely a speculation — that the herd immunity level will be about 70 to 85 percent. And that’s the time that we believe, if you look at the planned rollout of the vaccines, that we would hopefully get to that point somewhere by the end of the summer and the early fall.
You’re absolutely correct: If a significant number of people do not get vaccinated, then that would — that would delay where we would get to that endpoint, which is the reason that I underscore what Dr. Walensky said about the importance, in every aspect of what we do, of getting more people vaccinated — just as many people as we possibly can.
I want to also mention that we don’t want to get too hung up on reaching this endgame of herd immunity because every day that you put 2 million to 3 million vaccinations into people makes society be more and more protected. So you don’t have to wait until you get full herd immunity to get a really profound effect on what you could do.
For example, as Dr. Walensky said, she keeps her eye on that very carefully as they reevaluate the guidelines, so you can get 20, 30, 40, 50 percent of the people vaccinated and not yet quite meet the empiric number that we’re talking about and still get a very favorable effect from vaccines.
DR. WALENSKY: Maybe I’ll just add that the point of — incredibly important that these are local rates as well, so if you have a population rate that is 85 percent protected across the country but a community that’s only 50 percent protected, you can have outbreaks in that community. And so really we need this level of protection pervasive across all communities across the country.
