One of the more hilarious articles on herd immunity and vaccination I’ve encountered has, once again, been written by an epidemiologist: ‘Herd immunity was sold as the path out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s why we’re not talking about it anymore’, ABC, 3 June 2022
This gentleman [from ABC] is poking fun at people who “were attached to the now-discredited notion of letting a dangerous virus rip through the population to reach the critical level of population immunity needed to reduce transmission.” It’s ironic that this epidemiologist dares to make such a statement as it quickly becomes crystal clear from his illiterate talk that he doesn’t even understand what herd immunity is all about.
In the case of acute, self-limiting viral infections that have the potential to spread asymptomatically (e.g., SARS-CoV-2), there is no immune mechanism other than sterlising immunity that could lead to the “possible elimination or eradication” of SARS-CoV-2 that this windbag is alluding to. As none of the C-19 vaccines (including those that are in the pipeline) are capable of inducing sterilising immunity, and as SARS-CoV-2 can spread asymptomatically, his idea that “when available and taken up at sufficient levels — [vaccines] could squash virus transmission” is completely nonsensical to begin with.
He then goes further to make a mistake so egregious that it deeply perplexes me: he links an increased vaccination rate to a higher level of herd immunity (“HI”) and to a lower susceptibility of the population to infection! Here is the analogy he uses (quite literally) to describe how herd immunity works:
“In fact, much like a bushfire goes out when it runs out of fuel to burn, an epidemic begins to decline when the virus runs out of susceptible people to infect.”
He obviously is fully unaware of the real science that provides compelling evidence that vaccinees are not less, but more susceptible to infection! Unfortunately, even that information would be unlikely to help him understand the interactions between population-level immune pressure and the evolutionary dynamics of the virus. He believes that less effective vaccines (which, I assume, to him includes vaccines that, although protective against severe disease, enhance the susceptibility of vaccines to infection) simply require more people to get vaccinated to achieve HI...<<<Read More>>>....