Posted on 10/19/2020 9:22:27 AM PDT by Kaslin
Freaking out about ‘herd immunity’ looks like a smear campaign designed to prevent Americans, including the president, from hearing the scientific case against the lockdowns.
Why is the press and officialdom suddenly shrieking about “herd immunity”? On Oct. 12, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said pursuing herd immunity is “unethical.” Within hours, most of the media broadcast the same message. It’s as though someone sent out a list of talking points.
“Sweden’s experiment with herd immunity is unethical and undemocratic,” Australia’s ABC intoned, “and reveals an underlying political pathology.” According to Fortune, herd immunity against SARS-CoV2 is a “myth.”
Time called Sweden’s coronavirus response a “disaster.” “From early on,” the magazine claimed, “the Swedish government seemed to treat it as a foregone conclusion that many people would die.” The Washington Post is claiming that herd immunity is now the White House’s “strategy,” supposedly on advice from White House advisor Scott Atlas.
“Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus,” claimed the head of WHO, “not by exposing them to it.” According to him, “Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic.”
This is misleading. First, herd immunity is all about exposure. A study of nearly 6,000 individuals out Oc. 13 finds that, outside one outlier, the COVID-positive patients sampled retained their immunity to the disease for at least five to seven months, the duration of the study.
After enough people get and recover from an infection, the virus loses most of its routes for new infections. Indeed, the main purpose of the annual flu vaccine is to speed up herd immunity by reducing the number of susceptible people. Just as huddling inside in the winter helps spread flu, and thereby pneumonia, so herd immunity helps bring down death rates in the summer.
Second, herd immunity isn’t so much a strategy as a fact of life when dealing with infectious agents like the coronavirus. Even the Time article that lambasted Sweden admits that it’s not quite fair to say the Nordic country pursued a herd immunity “strategy.” Rather, it had an anti-lockdown policy.
Still, any strategy that ignores herd immunity is foolish, since that is precisely how infection rates fall in pandemics.
So why the renewed furor over herd immunity? We suspect it’s really aimed at the thousands of scientists and medical practitioners who have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which invokes the term favorably.
For lockdown partisans in the press and Big Tech, the declaration is a clear and present danger. They’re working hard to suppress it. After all, it refutes the narrative that all scientists agree with the lockdowns. Its three principal authors hail from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford universities. They have as many scientific chops as any of the lockdown partisans.
So the media have done everything they can, first to ignore, and then to tar, feather, and misrepresent the scientists who organized this effort. The campaign against a supposed “herd immunity strategy,” or what some call the “let people die” approach, is really a proxy war against the declaration.
Other, pro-lockdown scientists have now responded to the Great Barrington Declaration with the “John Snow Memorandum,” published in The Lancet on Oct. 14. Predictably, Dr. Anthony Fauci, when asked about the declaration, called it “dangerous” and “nonsense.”
This looks like a smear campaign designed to prevent Americans, including the president, from hearing the scientific case against the lockdowns. That’s much easier to do if the public thinks the only alternative is letting people die.
But the scientists behind the Great Barrington advocate nothing like that. They call for focused protection, a strategy that confers the greatest benefits with the fewest costs. These scientists argue that population-wide lockdowns are all pain and little gain. They also know that we’re going to reach herd immunity at some point whatever our approach. How much damage we cause in the meantime is the question.
Finally, they know that the elderly are about 1,000 times more at risk of death from COVID-19 than the young. Therefore, they argue, we should end the disastrous lockdowns, focus on protecting the most vulnerable, treat those who get sick with all the tools in our arsenal — including those President Trump received — and let immunity build up among those with very little risk.
This wasn’t the initial Swedish approach. That country failed to protect and sequester nursing homes, which were the source of most Swedish deaths.
The alternative is to keep pressing lockdowns, no matter the cost in lives and wellbeing, until a vaccine is available for all. That should be a non-starter. In our new book “The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe,” we show that the forced lockdowns had no discernable effect on the spread of the coronavirus. Worse, they will kill more people than the virus itself.
The Great Barrington Declaration has it right. And so does President Trump. But he has not yet clearly embraced the science and the many scientists who can provide the scientific heft behind this policy. That policy is focused protection. It is the most ethical and rational choice. The media campaign against “herd immunity” is a cynical effort to keep this approach from gaining traction.
Those authors are not doctors nor am I, but herd immunity will very likely if we follow Dr. Redfield’s advice (CDC DIRECTOR) and universally mask, which reduces viral load both in and out, and which tends to reduce deaths and the severity of the disease.
IDK if herd immunity can be achieved with this virus. It appears that natural immunity is short lived.
There are the questions of antibody dependent enhancement and re-activation of the virus.
The unique characteristics of this virus make the creation of a vaccine very difficult. I doubt that there will be a safe and effective vaccine. The ulterior motives for a vaccine are very strong.
There is no such thing as herd immunity as no immuity is provided. What is call “herd immunity” is actually a simple lack of exposure. Once an infected person from outside the herd enters into the population, those that never developed immunity can be infected.
As I understand it, “herd immunity” is a long-standing concept in virology and immunology, yet - right on cue - it is suddenly suspect, dangerous, and unethical! It sure seems that the left wants to use the epidemic to do as much political damage to Trump as possible, regardless of the cost in human lives and economic hardship.
It’s reckless if your health care policy goal is to extend the panic as long as possible to hurt a certain President you hate,
He then asked epidemiologist Osterholm about Bidens' plan and Osterholm then said Biden was promoting a vaccine which would give us herd immunity.
What you describe can herd immunity if the population the unexposed walks into has built a high percentage of people who are immune. By full blown disease or by universal masking.
How is the country choosing to not lockdown “undemocratic”? If the citizens don’t want the lockdowns, then not locking down is VERY democratic. Forcing people to lockdown against their will however (for their own good don’t you know) is the non-democratic approach. Orwellian
“Herd immunity is simply a fact of life.”
A much more valid number of deaths due to Covid, is eliminating all those who die above the regular life expectancy of approximately 80. Eliminating those deaths are already 50+% of the deaths — because those are the people one would expect to die anyway — and particularly, when they average 2.6 other chronic life-threatening diseases (comorbidities) already. And then those already in a long term care center or nursing home are recognized as people who are on the verge of dying, and no matter how many billions of dollars they have, the prognosis is that they will not live forever in that deteriorating condition. Even if they promise to give away HALF of their money AFTER they die.
And then we see that of those below 50, the virus has minimal mortality threat - but prudent people will adopt more hygenic practices, especially those with well-known susceptibilities. That’s what people have done for ages — so that everyone doesn’t die off and the human race goes extinct. At least 99% go on — even with manmade calamities like wars killing hundreds of MILLIONS of people — just in the last century alone! That has always been the normal.
So for people to think now that they can live forever in a seriously declining state of health is totally ludicrous — but currently popular among the billionaire crowd who think that what is the use of all their money if they cannot live forever? That’s a problem they have to solve themselves individually, and not hold the whole population hostage until someone discovers the magic pill of immortality (vaccine) for them.
Rather than only being only one cure (panacea) as the Faucis of the world claim, in all probability, many things work — because ultimately what they are doing is just strengthening the baseline immunity of different individuals — with different individual weaknesses. That’s why panaceas don’t work — but people improving their own health and fortunes in life work optimally — as it always has.
But now the self-appointed guardians of the truth as handed down by God Himself (the Pharisees and the Scribes), would like us to believe they hold the patent on every truth, and will decide that for humankind henceforth. That is the oldest story in the world.
Lockdowns kill.
Just Include the Media, Press, TV, Newspapers ,.. in the Lockdown, Quarantine ALL of them, shut their presses and stations down 100%.
See if they still prefer Lockdown Strategy
They don’t claim to be doctors.
In any given FIXED population, there are several responses to an infection.
Group A will get the infection and either will be cured, or survive and develop antibodies - they have immunity
Group B will get a vaccine if it is available and will develop antibodies - they have immunity
Group C will neither get the infection and for what ever reason, do not receive the vaccine - they are NOT immune
Group D will be those in group A or B who loose their immunity - they are NOT immune.
Now remember, we are deal only with a FIXED population. In this scenario if there are enough people in groups A & B and a small enough percent of the population in C & D, then the government / scientist / medical personnel CLAIM “herd immunity”. Understand that no actual immunity is provided to groups C & D. If they are exposed, because they have no immunity, they can get the illness.
Further, the population is no longer fixed at a local or even national level. People travel and someone who is a carrier can and often does, travel into the population bringing the illness back into play. Witness the recent outbreaks of childhood illnesses that were brought back to the US during the recent illegal migration from Latin America, even after having achieved “herd immunity”.
So if we have achieved “herd immunity”, say well into the 90+ percent, there are still those who can and will get the illness - they are NOT immune. They are relying on a lack of exposure to the illness. If someone exposes them, they are just as likely to get sick as before the so called “herd immunity”.
I know how this works all too well. As a child, I was contra indicated for the small pox vaccine due to a skin condition. During my school years, my district would put out a notice to all of us that could not receive all of our vaccines. I had to ... every year ... reaffirm that I could not receive the vaccine and that I was still not vaccinated.
When I joined the Army at 18, my skin condition had subsided and I was able to get the vaccine then. I am very pro voluntary vaccine. I have traveled the world with my job and I have been vaccinated against just about everything except Japanese Encephalitis.
My point is simply this. The term “herd immunity” is used by the government as a subtle manipulation and is an attempt to get everyone vaccinated.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.