Hi, I'm Dan Premack, and welcome to Axios Recap, sponsored by United Health Group.

Today's Thursday, April 8th. Tech stocks are up, the global middle class, and down,

and we're focused on what vaccine hesitancy means for herd immunity.

Did you get the vaccine yet? It's become the latest addition to American small talk up there with the weather and last night's ball game. And with pretty good reason,

as over 42% of U.S. adults have now gotten at least one jab, while nearly one and four of us

are fully vaccinated. It's the great public health

success story of our lifetimes, with the speed of vaccine development finally being matched

by the speed of vaccine distribution, a legitimate light at the end of the tunnel with normalcy

on the other side. But, and you knew there'd be a but, not everyone who hasn't yet gotten a shot is eager to get one.

According to a survey from Kaiser Health, roughly 13% of U.S. adults don't plan to get the vaccine at all.

7% will get it only if required, and another 17% want to wait and see.

That latter group, the 17%, is known as the vaccine hesitant, and it's been shrinking, but it remains pretty large. And the more unvaccinated people we have, the greater the potential for spread, or even worse, for the virus to mutate. So today we want to dig into the practical impacts of vaccine hesitancy, what it might mean for the

potential of a fourth wave, and how we might arrive at herd immunity, with Dr. Atul Gawande,

a best-selling author, surgeon, and advisor to the Biden administration. That conversation

in 15 seconds. We're joined now by Dr. Atul Gawande. So, Dr. Atul Gawande, so, Dr. Let's start kind of digging in first to this goal or idea of herd immunity, particularly given the relatively large number of Americans who say they either will not get the vaccine or are hesitant to get a vaccine. Is there a numerical goal to reaching herd immunity in the U.S.? Well, you're asking two

questions in one. What is our goal? And second, what is herd immunity? Herd immunity means the

idea that we will eliminate COVID-19 from our territory, from the United States. And I actually

think that that's an unlikely goal. I think our real goal is to get transmission

so low and enough people vaccinated and protected in a variety of ways that our death rates are

below flu levels at a minimum. So instead of 1,000 deaths a day, we want to get down well below

100 deaths a day.

And our ideal world is that we would get immunity so widespread that it would be eliminated,

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