He believes mandating vaccines, as was done for smallpox during the Revolutionary War, would “protect our right as Americans to be free of preventable diseases.”
What he’s talking about is achieving and maintaining so-called vaccine-acquired “herd immunity,” the theory which maintains that once a majority of people have been vaccinated, the infectious disease in question can no longer spread and everyone is protected, including the tiny minority who for whatever reason are not or cannot be vaccinated.
The problem with this argument is that it doesn’t work for vaccines. While there is such a thing as herd immunity among populations in which a majority has had the infectious disease and acquired a long lasting natural immunity, vaccines confer only temporary artificial immunity, and so true herd immunity is unlikely to be fully achieved, even if nearly 100 percent of the population are vaccinated....read more>>...
