Why Herd Immunity Is a Bad Public Health Policy
Scientists in a top medical journal warn that herd immunity is ‘fraught with risks’
Herd immunity has reentered the national coronavirus conversation, this time because of a controversial document, endorsed by President Trump, known as the Great Barrington Declaration. Published on October 4 and written by a trio of scientists, this document calls for an end to lockdowns, the reopening of businesses and schools, and increased reliance on the concept of herd immunity: the concept that a virus can’t spread as easily if a sufficient proportion of the population is immune.
The basic concept behind the Great Barrington Declaration is that people at high risk of being vulnerable to Covid-19 should be sequestered while everyone else should be allowed to live life normally. The latter group very well could get Covid-19, but the hope is that they’d be more likely to recover and thus gain immunity, and eventually enough people will have immunity (a proportion of people known as the “herd immunity threshold”) that the virus will no longer be able to spread. This way, the authors argue, nationwide lockdowns will no longer be necessary. It’s obvious why this theory appealed to the White House, which has refused to impose national lockdowns even when scientists said they were a necessary…
