Am I looking at the wrong parts of those pages? In the first I see "The threshold for establishing herd immunity for COVID-19 is not yet clear." and in the second I see "The proportion of the population that must be vaccinated against COVID-19 to begin inducing herd immunity is not known."
Also, the threshold for herd immunity is based partially on how well the virus spreads, and Delta changed that, which means that the threshold for herd immunity probably changed. When facts change, the messaging needs to change to stay accurate.
It is a moving target because yes - we don't (as a society) have a ton of practice with worldwide pandemics. Information evolves and our expert's interpretation evolves with it. If you reject opinions from everyone who has ever changed their mind after receiving more information you'll be left with one or two ridiculously lucky people and a who bunch of stubborn morons who simply reject the notion that their past selves might have been incorrect.
Society has been experiencing pandemics for as long as society has existed. There is literally nothing humanity has more experience with than disease.
Herd immunity is a moving target because people like Fauci change their assessment of it depending on opinion polls. That's by his own words, not anyone else's. The guy admitted it to the New York Times. The "science" is not evolving and people who keep claiming it is, are just hurting the credibility of actual science even more than it's already been hurt. After all, a "science" that is constantly asserting things with 100% confidence and then next week asserts something totally different, also with 100% confidence (which they do), is actually pretty worthless to society.
It's not that I reject it it's that Id like to see something like git logs. Public health officials should drop the aura of infallibility and adopt some dev community style humility.
I am in disagreement with most of my family on this point (taking the least popular point of view). I understand the idea that transparency always allows better information around personal decisions - but I'm not certain if more transparency that might include speculation during a pandemic would actually lead to a greater sense of public safety. I feel like generally being transparent does increase public stability by increasing faith in the government - but I also feel like a pandemic is a good time to burn some of that public good will to keep a unified message to the public.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201101161006/https:/www.who.in...
https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/coronavirus-disease...