Are Some Countries Seeking Herd Immunity?

[feder1]

Initially the Covid virus was bigger than all of us and most places just it rip. Like a huge tsunami against which we had no defence. I even believe that was really the UK,s approach until a couple of months ago, judging from the lack of efforts to slow it down.

However, along comes a miracle - vaccine availability to the UK and now the gubmint has gone full tilt the other way, achieving some success! It may be even be possible to achieve greater than 50% takeup of the jab in the UK.

When you look at the actions taken by many other countries it seems they have no faith in that approach. This may be because their populations have indicated much less interest in saving themselves by vaccination, and their governments knew they could not persuade them otherwise.

[XFool]

Initially the Covid virus was bigger than all of us and most places just it rip. Like a huge tsunami against which we had no defence. I even believe that was really the UK,s approach until a couple of months ago, judging from the lack of efforts to slow it down.

Uh?

However, along comes a miracle - vaccine availability to the UK and now the gubmint has gone full tilt the other way, achieving some success! It may be even be possible to achieve greater than 50% takeup of the jab in the UK.

Sorry! You've lost me...

Is this about, "the vaccine" or about "COVID-19 mitigation policy"? Not that they aren't somewhat related...

When you look at the actions taken by many other countries it seems they have no faith in that approach. This may be because their populations have indicated much less interest in saving themselves by vaccination, and their governments knew they could not persuade them otherwise.

Example?

Personally, I wish somebody would finally take "herd immunity" outside, shoot it, set fire to it's body, then bury it's remains in a very deep hole somewhere remote. Then finally, we could all forget about it. At last!

[dealtn]

I think all countries are seeking herd immunity. Why wouldn't they want immunity for the majority of the population?

[Clariman]

I think all countries are seeking herd immunity. Why wouldn't they want immunity for the majority of the population?

Herd immunity through vaccination rather than everyone having had it.

[dealtn]

I think all countries are seeking herd immunity. Why wouldn't they want immunity for the majority of the population?

Herd immunity through vaccination rather than everyone having had it.

I'm not disagreeing, but it isn't clear from the OP's post (other than the title thread) what is being asked, or invited to discuss.

[feder1]

I used the phrase "herd immunity" to mean letting it rip and allowing the weak to succumb. This seemed to be the meaning a year ago.

Since the advent of the vaccine we now use herd immunity to mean that the majority will be immune because of vaccination. I think that is herd protection.

Site worldindata shows how countries differ in vaccination percentages.

[dealtn]

In which case I would revise my answer to "No" then.

[Julian]

I'm as confused by this post as some others seem to be. You seem to be seeing things very differently to the way I do, no crime in that, but maybe you could clarify. In particular...

Initially the Covid virus was bigger than all of us and most places just it rip. Like a huge tsunami against which we had no defence. I even believe that was really the UK,s approach until a couple of months ago, judging from the lack of efforts to slow it down.

How can you possibly say that closing down massive parts of the economy for most of the last 11 months with a resulting level of debt not seen since the aftermath of WW2 is "lack of efforts to slow it down". I really don't get where you're coming from here.

However, along comes a miracle - vaccine availability to the UK and now the gubmint has gone full tilt the other way, achieving some success! It may be even be possible to achieve greater than 50% takeup of the jab in the UK.

I'm not sure I'd call it a miracle. A lot of knowledge and hard work by a lot of scientists, and definitely a relief because it was by no means certain that an effective vaccine would emerge from all that hard work but a miracle? Personally I reserve that word for something that happens against pretty much all odds or reasonable expectations but maybe that's just the atheist in me railing against what I perceive as religious or at least unscientific connotations.

Anyway, minor nit-picking on entirely personal choices of terminology aside, I don't think the vaccine changed the UK's strategy in any way. At the very least we are hoping that the vaccines will prevent people getting seriously ill thus saving lives and "protecting the NHS". Any sane person also I assume really hopes that further data collected on the effects of the vaccines will indicate at least some, and hopefully significant, ability to prevent infections thus breaking at least some transmission chains that would otherwise happen, effectively to "flatten the curve" of case growth. So - "protect the NHS" and "flatten the curve" - sound familiar? Those were the objectives on 16th March 2020 when the first UK national lockdown started. Essentially a national lockdown was the closest that we could get to vaccinating the population in the absence of having an actual vaccine so we had to try and achieve at least partially the same results by non-pharmaceutical (and massively damaging to the society and the economy) means.

I would add that the other non-pharmaceutical intervention that can in some circumstances help break transmission chains and act as at least a partial proxy for real vaccines is a good test/trace/isolate system. That is pretty much useless when cases get to a certain volume such that there is no chance of containing or even attenuating the growth rate of individual clusters but in the early days, and also in the summer of 2020 when the first national lockdown had driven numbers very low, it might have kept the country open for longer and reduced the severity of this second wave. Sadly we still haven't got that right and this is maybe my single biggest regret at the moment because if we had a tried and tested (and effective) system in place right now it would be another important safety measure when coming out of this current lockdown but unfortunately our system is still not, in my opinion, good enough e.g. insufficient support for people asked to isolate.

When you look at the actions taken by many other countries it seems they have no faith in that approach. This may be because their populations have indicated much less interest in saving themselves by vaccination, and their governments knew they could not persuade them otherwise.

The USA is vaccinating at a high rate. I don't think the EU has no faith in the approach, it has invested billions in vaccines, but has hit a number of speed bumps along the way. It's true that places like Australia seem to be taking more of a "we'll get to that" approach as opposed to the UK's urgency but that's because, probably partly due to geography and draconian border controls, its contact tracing did turn out to be a very effective vaccine replacement so it has more time. It also had some draconian lockdowns early on so it used non-pharmaceutical interventions very effectively. Same for New Zealand. Other countries such as many African ones are desperate to get vaccinating but just don't have the supplies.

As for herd immunity I did hear it discussed in the very early days but I don't get the impression that the UK ever flipped strategy. I agree that at one point it did actively give up on contact tracing during the first lock down but I think that's more because the numbers simply overwhelmed the system so it gave up trying at least for a while. In my view that was one of the UK's huge mistakes. It should at least have been using the first lockdown to try and build a capable system that could have hit the ground running in July 2020 instead of months later still having Dido Harding and her crew squandering billions on contact tracers either being given no one to call for days on end or 10 different contact tracers calling the same person multiple times with no knowledge that the person had already been contacted, had tested positive, and was already isolating.

Ultimately I agree with Xfool (assuming he(?) is talking about letting the virus run rampant rather than vaccination) that we should "take herd immunity outside, shoot it, set fire to its body, then bury its remains in a very deep hole somewhere remote". With what we're seeing already with mutations and new variants letting the virus rip through a large population with the huge increase in the number of replication events that would give rise to would, at least it seems to me, significantly increase the risk of escape variants emerging potentially even more nasty than the South African or Brazilian ones. Already in Brazil there is some evidence that a community (Manus) thought to have achieved herd immunity against the original variant subsequently had significant re-infection rates from the new Brazilian variant (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanc ... 5/fulltext). There is also the concern that the South African variant might substantially escape the Oxford/AZ vaccine at least as far as non-severe symptomatic infection is concerned and it also looks as if efficacy of many of the other vaccines is reduced too although not to the same extent (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/worl ... frica.html). Then we also need to consider escape against current monoclonal antibody treatments undermining improvements made to date in treating those that do still get severe infections (or an infection that would become severe in the absence of such treatments).

All this makes me wonder whether herd immunity via natural infection is even possible at this stage. SARS-Cov2 is a fairly new zoonotic virus and I am told (by a member of NERVTAG) that it is to be expected that zoonotic viruses will exhibit the highest rates of mutation in the period when they have first jumped the species barrier and then tend to settle down (e.g. one of the viruses causing the common cold is thought to have been relatively stable for the last 500 years!) so maybe if we were a much less technologically advanced society and our only defence was naturally acquired herd immunity then we might get there eventually (in a few decades? centuries?) but probably at dreadful human cost and as a strategy in today's world I'm right there shovel in hand ready to help Xfool dig that deep hole in which to bury the burnt body of naturally acquired herd immunity.

- Julian

[GrahamPlatt]

Hi feder1

I suggest you have a listen to this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m ... e-alliance

[XFool]

I used the phrase "herd immunity" to mean letting it rip and allowing the weak to succumb. This seemed to be the meaning a year ago.

Since the advent of the vaccine we now use herd immunity to mean that the majority will be immune because of vaccination. I think that is herd protection.

Site worldindata shows how countries differ in vaccination percentages.

In which case, your question makes no sense whatsoever!

Any country using your "herd immunity" would, presumably, vaccinate nobody as a matter of policy. Countries with low vaccination rates are simply behind, or cannot readily afford the costs, or are dependant on being helped by other, wealthier countries.

I said it before, I'll say it again: By now "herd immunity" should have been blasted into space, aboard a rocket targeted for the centre of the Sun.

Why are we even discussing this?

Should we repeal The Corn Laws? Good idea, YES/NO? What do YOU think?

[Lanark]

The problem with achieving herd immunity through allowing people to get infected is that the more infections that are are running wild, the more variants of the virus will appear.

For viruses which spread relatively slowly it may be possible to reach herd immunity before a new variant appears and just sacrifice the 1% of people who die or get serious long term illness, but it seems clear that Covid can spread too far and too fast for that to work.

What would be more likely is the disease spreads and you have 1% death rate, then another variant spreads and another 1% die, and then another variant spreads and so on...

This is why it is so important for unvaccinated people to isolate until the vaccine is fully rolled out, all it would take is one more variant to appear which becomes immune to the vaccines we have, and the world will be right back to square 1.

[jfgw]

I used the phrase "herd immunity" to mean letting it rip and allowing the weak to succumb. This seemed to be the meaning a year ago.

Since the advent of the vaccine we now use herd immunity to mean that the majority will be immune because of vaccination. I think that is herd protection.

"Herd Immunity" was used a lot earlier than a year ago and most certainly was not limited to immunity acquired through infection.

"Though coined almost a century ago [8], the term ‘‘herd immunity’’ was not widely used until recent decades, its use stimulated by the increasing use of vaccines, discussions of disease eradication, and analyses of the costs and benefits of vaccination programs. An important milestone was the recognition by Smith in 1970 [9] and Dietz in 1975 [10] of a simple threshold theorem—that if immunity (ie, successful vaccination) were delivered at random and if members of a population mixed at random, such that on average each individual contacted R0 individuals in a manner sufficient to transmit the infection [11, 12], then incidence of the infection would decline if the proportion immune exceeded (R021)/R0,or1–1/R0."
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/52/7/911/299077

"We need to take back control of the definition of "herd immunity", but the medical fraternity first needs to get its own house in order"
https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3714/rr-5

I said it before, I'll say it again: By now "herd immunity" should have been blasted into space, aboard a rocket targeted for the centre of the Sun.

We need to stop vaccinating people then, otherwise there is a risk of reaching the HIT!

Immunity is made up of at least three factors:
1. Prior immunity (such as cross immunity);
2. Acquired immunity through infection;
3. Immunity through being vaccinated.

If we reach the HIT, it will not be due only to prior infection or only to vaccinations etc. it will be due to the sum of these. It may be, say, 90% vaccinations and 10% other but it will still be a combination of factors.

There are only two ways out of this pandemic: complete eradication or herd immunity. Complete eradication would have to be worldwide unless we closed our borders. I think that complete eradication would be incredibly difficult unless a level of herd immunity is achieved first.


Julian F. G. W.

[Nimrod103]

There are only two ways out of this pandemic: complete eradication or herd immunity. Complete eradication would have to be worldwide unless we closed our borders. I think that complete eradication would be incredibly difficult unless a level of herd immunity is achieved first.


Julian F. G. W.

So when Professor Devi Sridhar, Chair of Global Public Health and an adviser to the Scottish government, says that we should be aiming at complete eradication in the UK (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/arti ... tmare.html), is she being realistic? There is every likelihood that because children won't be vaccinated and there is a very low uptake in ethnic minorities, probably only c.70% of Britons will be vaccinated, which is probably not enough to reach herd immunity.
So I assume Sridhar wants a permanent lockdown, and sealed borders to achieve eradication?

[Mike4]

There is every likelihood that because children won't be vaccinated and there is a very low uptake in ethnic minorities, probably only c.70% of Britons will be vaccinated, which is probably not enough to reach herd immunity.

Is it really as high as 70%?

Has anyone any official estimated figures for a probable final percentage of the population that will be vaccinated?

My own estimate is 50% of the population, given 20% of the population is under 18 and ineligible, plus all the anti-vaxxers, the huge contingent of rebellious but not very bright 'it's my right to choose not to take it', the 'vaccine hesitant', the women worried about it affecting their fertility, the people who can't have it for medical reasons, and so on.

[mc2fool]

Has anyone any official estimated figures for a probable final percentage of the population that will be vaccinated?

A quick google finds this topical Oxford study. (Beware the potential politics trap )

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-02-24-ma ... ford-study

"More than three quarters of people in the UK now say they are ’very likely’ to have the vaccine".

If you dig into the survey data itself it's: Very Unlikely 7.8%, Unlikely 4.9%, Likely 10.6%, Very Likely 76.7%. (Excludes people who've already had it.)

[1nvest]

NHS figures indicated 92% of Covid deaths occur in the 60+ age bracket. Seems like once most of those for whom it is fatal have either died or been vaccinated (that significantly reduces the risk of needing hospitalisation) then deaths will trend lower, which infers fewer hospitalisations (NHS coping, no need for lockdowns/masks).

Herd immunity isn't perhaps required. If only a very small proportion of those contracting the virus require hospitalisation then it becomes more of 'just another bug'.

[Mike4]

Has anyone any official estimated figures for a probable final percentage of the population that will be vaccinated?

A quick google finds this topical Oxford study. (Beware the potential politics trap )

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-02-24-ma ... ford-study

"More than three quarters of people in the UK now say they are ’very likely’ to have the vaccine".

If you dig into the survey data itself it's: Very Unlikely 7.8%, Unlikely 4.9%, Likely 10.6%, Very Likely 76.7%. (Excludes people who've already had it.)

Hmmm thanks.

I note there is no option for the "Hell will freeze over before I consent to being vaccinated" point of view.

I personally know someone with the "Nobody tells me what to do so I won't be caving in to government instructions to get vaccinated" kind of bolshy, anti-authoritarian kind of attitude. Odd really because they are quite a left wing, socially aware, community-minded, hippy type of person otherwise.

Quite a few of the lefty-hippy types seem to think this way it seems, which I find quite perplexing.

[GoSeigen]

A quick google finds this topical Oxford study. (Beware the potential politics trap )

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-02-24-ma ... ford-study

"More than three quarters of people in the UK now say they are ’very likely’ to have the vaccine".

If you dig into the survey data itself it's: Very Unlikely 7.8%, Unlikely 4.9%, Likely 10.6%, Very Likely 76.7%. (Excludes people who've already had it.)

Hmmm thanks.

I note there is no option for the "Hell will freeze over before I consent to being vaccinated" point of view.

I personally know someone with the "Nobody tells me what to do so I won't be caving in to government instructions to get vaccinated" kind of bolshy, anti-authoritarian kind of attitude. Odd really because they are quite a left wing, socially aware, community-minded, hippy type of person otherwise.

Quite a few of the lefty-hippy types seem to think this way it seems, which I find quite perplexing.

It's not really that strange when you take a moment to consider the extreme haste in producing these vaccines, the corners cut, and the urging of incompetent government to roll them out. You've heard of Thalidomide presumably?

GS

[Arborbridge]

Initially the Covid virus was bigger than all of us and most places just it rip. Like a huge tsunami against which we had no defence. I even believe that was really the UK,s approach until a couple of months ago, judging from the lack of efforts to slow it down.

However, along comes a miracle - vaccine availability to the UK and now the gubmint has gone full tilt the other way, achieving some success! It may be even be possible to achieve greater than 50% takeup of the jab in the UK.

When you look at the actions taken by many other countries it seems they have no faith in that approach. This may be because their populations have indicated much less interest in saving themselves by vaccination, and their governments knew they could not persuade them otherwise.

The narrative described in the first two paragraphs is so far apart from my experience of what happened in the past year in the UK, I wonder if the poster lived somewhere else.

There was talk of herd immunity very early on, but that was soon dropped - then we went in to measures to limit the spread (many would say too late and too little, but that's another discussion). And the "miracle" wasn't - it was the result of excellent work by scientists, not miracle workers, helped by government easing the way. The plan always was, as everyone can surely see, to limit the virus as much as possible within the restraints of keeping the economy going, until a vaccine could be developed.

Arb.

[Mike4]

It's not really that strange when you take a moment to consider the extreme haste in producing these vaccines, the corners cut, and the urging of incompetent government to roll them out. You've heard of Thalidomide presumably?

GS

Are you really suggesting the developers of our vaccines learned nothing from the Thalidomide disaster?

Word fail me.