6 Reasons Why Herd Immunity Without a Vaccine Is a Terrible Idea in This Pandemic

 It's a tantalizing prospect to think that herd immunity could end the coronavirus pandemic. If true herd immunity were achieved, the coronavirus would not spread, and that we could return to normal life as we knew it before.

But herd immunity is difficult to drag off. It can only be achieved in two ways: by getting plenty of people sick, or by giving many people a good, safe vaccine.

The goal is that the same: to urge a sizeable majority of the population proof against infection, so a disease can not spread among our collective 'herd'.

The consensus among epidemiologists is that chasing herd immunity without a vaccine wouldn't work. It risks too many unnecessary deaths.

Even so, the concept has become a subject of conversation in households, on social media, on TV, in bars - with people asking: "Why not try it?" Those conversations gained steam last month when the White House propped up the nice Barrington Declaration, a document drafted at a Libertarian company suggesting that almost all people should try and select herd immunity, encouraging infections among the world's young, healthy population.

"For those that are under … for example 60 or 50, the lockdown harms are, mentally and physically, worse than COVID," Jay Bhattacharya, one in every one of the authors of the declaration said last week, during a debate hosted by the medical journal JAMA.

Opposite him was epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch from Harvard, one amongst the thousands of leading experts who signed on to a stinging rebuttal of the declaration, who explained why the approach is so dangerous.

"I think it is a great idea to appear for creative solutions, but nobody responsible would abandon what we all know works, which is controlling viral spread," Lipsitch said.

Their conversation threw up six overarching reasons why achieving natural herd immunity - the sort that does not require a coronavirus vaccine - won't work.

One: Nobody thinks it is a good idea to induce everybody infected, but just targeting the young is near impossible

You'd be hard-pressed to seek out a significant public health expert who thinks natural herd immunity will work.

Leaders in Sweden recently backtracked on their unique stab at herd immunity against the virus because it killed such a lot of people in their nursing homes.

Bhattacharya name-checked Sweden as a decent example of herd immunity done right.

But, when pressed, he agreed that letting anyone within the population get sick so as to draw near disease resistance within the community isn't a decent idea. "You should social distance once you can definitely use masks after you can't social distance," he said. "All of the mitigation measures are really important."

Even Sweden's approach failed to follow what the nice Barrington Declaration suggests: "focused protection" for the vulnerable, and focused infection of the young and healthy.

Bhattacharya asked listeners for his or her ideas about the way to achieve this focused approach and added some of his own ideas, including employing rapid testing in nursing homes and multi-generational households and isolating cases.

"We protect the vulnerable with every single tool we've got," he said. "We use our testing resources. We use our staff rotations in nursing homes. We use PPE. We do every kind of thing."

The problem is, those ideas are already being tried across the US, to only mixed success.

Nevada has found the US's new federal rapid testing protocol in nursing homes so unreliable that the state sought to ban them last month, a home workforce already spread thin is getting sick, and case isolation is near-impossible to attain within the dangerous pre-symptomatic phase of the many illnesses, when people may transmit their virus to others before they even know they need it.

Two: COVID-19 has many long-term side effects which will impact lives and also the healthcare system for years to come back

The second issue with this idea of "focused protection" is that we do not actually know who we'd like to safeguard.

"For younger populations, and folks who are less in danger, frankly, COVID is a smaller amount of a risk than the lockdown," Bhattacharya said, reiterating that such closures harm people's psychological, mental, and physical health.

But COVID-19 doesn't just kill people. It also has devastating long-term effects on many of its survivors, including debilitating brain fog, hair loss, swollen toes, and scaly rashes, tinnitus, and loss of smell.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention notes that almost half (45.4 percent) of the adult population within the US is in danger for COVID-19 complications - including death - "because of upset, diabetes, respiratory illness, hypertension, or cancer."

Three: we do not actually know who COVID-19 kills and why

The argument for "focused protection" also ignores the truth of what we've learned about the coronavirus: it's killed people of each age, race, and sex because it tears through community after community across the world.

In the US, quite 45,500 people under the age of 65 have died from the coronavirus thus far, per the CDC.

It's impossible to understand, before someone becomes infected, what their true risk is. Children have died. So have college students and lots of others who failed to necessarily have hallmark preconditions.

Scientists are still studying the virus to raised understand how it works, but a unifying thread among severe cases could also be what percentage of ACE-2 receptors (which the virus uses to invade our cells) we've got.

Four: Lockdowns save lives

Lockdowns, though they're an extreme disease-fighting measure, have saved tens of thousands of lives around the world, on nearly every continent.

When schools are closed, more kids go hungry, and education gets interrupted too. Domestic abuse, ill-usage, habit, and suicidal ideation have all gone up in recent months within the US.

"I haven't been able to visit church nose to nose, really, in seven months," Bhattacharya lamented.

However, these measures have bought critical, life-saving time for developing vaccines, formulating drugs, and discovering best practices for patient treatment. "Six months from now, [a] case may well be prevented by vaccination, or can be treated by a far better therapeutic," Lipsitch said.

Bhattacharya also argued that lockdowns are "the single biggest generator of inequality since segregation."

But that's a deeply misleading statement. Racial inequality, for instance, has not been generated by the pandemic, if anything it's only been unmasked.

"Obviously, the African-American community has suffered from racism for a really, very long period of your time," Dr. Fauci told members of Congress in June. "

And I cannot imagine that that has not contributed to the conditions that they find themselves in, economically and otherwise."

Five: Getting obviate the virus is feasible, and it doesn't require killing people

Bhattacharya, and other backers of herd immunity, often peddle a false dichotomy between lockdowns and "normal life," with no area or room for virus-fighting in between.

But that either-or approach doesn't take into consideration what proportion mitigation measures like distancing, avoiding crowds, and getting everybody wearing masks can really help slow viral transmission.

Besides, the US has never really, truly tried to lock down yet. Even within the spring, "we really functionally close up only about 50 percent," Fauci recently told members of Congress.

Countries including Australia, New Zealand, and China have already achieved the "impossible goal" of zero (or, near zero) COVID, and have largely gone back to normal life after strict lockdowns. 

Taiwan even did it without locking down the least bit, by instituting strict screening and surveillance measures, effective isolation and quarantining, and widespread masking.

Six: Natural herd immunity probably won't work for this pandemic, irrespective of how hard we try

The US, like everywhere else within the world, still features a great distance to travel to hit even a number of very cheap posited herd immunity thresholds, which require 50 percent (or more) of the population to be exposed and subsequently immune. At best, only around 10 percent to twenty percent of individuals nationwide are exposed.

But whether or not everyone was to become exposed to the virus, natural herd immunity likely still wouldn't work.

This is thanks to the way that our immunity against all coronaviruses - from common colds to the current novel coronavirus - wanes over time. Immunity to the present virus through prior infection isn't definitive, or lasting: coronavirus reinfections are possible, and they are happening in some rare cases already.

That's why serious scientists agree it's better to attend for a vaccine and build up our collective immunity against the virus simultaneously.

"Humans don't seem to be herded," the WHO decision-maker of Health Emergencies Mike Ryan said in May, slamming the thought.

"I think we want to be really careful after we use terms during this way around natural infections in humans because it can cause an awfully brutal arithmetic which doesn't put people, and life, and suffering at the center of that equation."

One projection suggests that attempting herd immunity within the US would end in 640,000 deaths by February 2023.

It's true that there are adverse consequences. many folks have lost their jobs, shuttered their businesses, missed doctor's appointments, experienced more loneliness, and commenced drinking more alcohol.