'What we’re just aiming at is just getting as many Americans vaccinated as possible,' to get to COVID-19 herd immunity: Doctor

Co-Founder & Medical Director GoodStock Consulting LLC; Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Virginia, Dr. Ebony Jade Hilton, joined Yahoo Finance Live to break down India's COVID-19 case surge and what it means for the global economy.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Anjalee, we're going to keep talking about this with Dr. Ebony Jade Hilton, the co-founder and medical director, GoodStock Consulting LLC, also an associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the University of Virginia. Thank you for joining us. It's good to have you here. Let's talk to parents. This news that a 12-year-old might be eligible for the Pfizer vaccine, what concern, if any, should a parent have in protecting their child?

EBONY JADE HILTON: Right, I think parents definitely are thinking, what should I do as far as this intervention? And just like we say for adults, weighing the risk-benefit of having this intervention. What we know is that 30% of all children who have been contracted with COVID-19 now have long hauler symptoms. And what does that do to the developing body? We have inflammation around the heart, inflammation around their lungs, their kidneys. They're not fully developed yet. And so, giving them that boost of protection in vaccinating your child now may have lifelong impact on their longevity and quality of life.

SEANA SMITH: And doctor, speaking of the vaccination efforts that are underway, we just heard from President Biden earlier this afternoon. He wants 160 million US adults to be fully vaccinated by July 4th. At what point should we start to see cases in the US begin to drop sharply from vaccinations?

EBONY JADE HILTON: Right, well, if we can use other-- Israel, for instance, as our guide, what we see is that once they got to about 60%, we saw the crossing over of vaccinations and cases, right? And so we use that as a herd immunity threshold. And we don't know what that's going to be in the United States, especially with our variant cast going up. So that threshold may be 70%. It may be 80%. What we're just aiming at is that getting as many Americans vaccinated as possible across all age groups.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Are any countries vaccinating children with these vaccines yet? I mean, we mention Israel all the time. Have they started to vaccinate people under the age of 16?

EBONY JADE HILTON: Not yet. And again, I think this should bode confidence for the public in that we're following science. And we're conducting these clinical trials to see if it's actually safe first before we push it out. And so we will see, you know, 12 to 15-year-olds now being vaccinated. And as stated earlier, by September, we're hoping between the ages of two to 12 will be able to be vaccinated. But we have to prove that safety first before giving that to our youth.

SEANA SMITH: Doctor, when we talk about herd immunity, I think there's lots of questions as to whether or not the US will ever really reach that herd immunity threshold. But what's needed then to restore normalcy if we're looking at specific targets or specific metrics?

EBONY JADE HILTON: Right, unfortunately, what we've seen is vaccine hesitancy has really hit a wall at this point. We had a decrease of 30% of vaccine uptake over the last few days. And what I urge Americans to think about is not only the health consequence, but-- you all are on Yahoo Finance-- the financial consequence. Comparing what happened in 1918 pandemic, we know that ended in 1920.

But what happened in 1929 but the Great Depression, right? Because the workers, those persons were now sick. Those long hauler people that now have a difficulty breathing, that have heart failure, right, that are having these neurologic complications of cognitive disability and not being able to think and have attention span. What would that do to our economic security as a nation and globally? We have to get this under control. And vaccination is the safest way to do that.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Doctor, very quickly, is herd immunity necessary? I mean, we don't have herd immunity for all kinds of things, yet we have vaccines for them.

EBONY JADE HILTON: Right, but we have vaccines for them, which helped us to create this herd immunity, right? We don't have to deal with measles, mumps, and rubella like they used to, or polio, because we've been vaccinated. And if COVID-19 were not killing still at this point 600 to 1,000 people a day, then we wouldn't have to talk about getting these vaccines in the arms of Americans as fast as we are.

But we see the consequence when we have an outbreak. We see it in India, we see it in Brazil. The same thing can happen within your community. We can have herd immunity nationwide. But if in your pocket of persons, if you don't have herd immunity, if no one's getting vaccinated within your town, your locality, it takes one visitor to wipe that entire place out. We have to be vigilant.

ADAM SHAPIRO: And we hear you loud and clear. Dr. Ebony Jade Hilton, thank you so much for joining.