No product launch in history was botched as badly as herd immunity. Introduced to the public on Friday March 13th in Sir Patrick Vallance’s media interviews, it enjoyed a short life before being pronounced dead and buried by the Sunday morning news shows. First impressions last, and for most people hearing of the concept for the first time, its reputation was irrevocably tarnished.
But its portrayal as an irresponsible, heartless policy to allow the disease to rampage indiscriminately through the country could not be more inaccurate. Herd immunity has kept the human species alive for two million years. In the absence of a vaccine, herds (or populations, if you prefer) do not get wiped out by new viruses. Natural barriers are formed within the herd that contain and deprive the virus of space to expand. Herd immunity is not a policy choice, in that it can’t be rejected and put back on the shelf. It will happen eventually, regardless of the interventions we make. It is a human conceit that we can control natural processes. Instead, rather like a martial art, the question is how to channel herd immunity to counter the virus.
As Dr David L Katz argued in his New York Times article ‘Is our fight against coronavirus worse than the disease‘, the specific profile of COVID-19 lends itself to a herd immunity approach. The data “clearly points to clear and important risk differentials for severe coronavirus infection…based on age and prior health”. Unlike influenza, it does not kill children, meaning there’s very little risk of exposure for one of the most vulnerable groups in our societies. In the absence of a vaccine, a strategy of shielding the vulnerable, while allowing herd immunity to build amongst less vulnerable groups, can minimise the aggregate of direct and indirect costs. The current obsessive focus on a single metric –the number of deaths of people with COVID-19 – is counter-productive as it’s an incomplete measure of the true costs and benefits of policy choices. The impact on public health outcomes of poverty, lack of access to healthcare and basic services, will also have a massive, and currently unmeasured, effect. Katz proposes that policy choices should be based on “total harm minimisation”.
Swedish Professor Johan Giesecke, the first Chief Scientist of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, goes further. In a scathing interview, he challenges not only the assumptions behind Imperial College’s model and the UK policy choices based on that model, such as closing schools, but argues that the virus amounts to a “tsunami of a usually quite mild disease” that will wash over Europe regardless of the lockdown, with at least half of the population becoming infected. Public health policy choices by individual countries will, over time, have little impact on the number of deaths, but the costs of the lockdowns will far exceed those of a targeted strategy to protect the most vulnerable. Giesecke goes further than Katz and considers the political as well as the economic costs, citing how Viktor Orban in Hungary has used the virus to suspend normal parliamentary democracy. (Our own Government isn’t far off doing that, either.) In an article from April 20th in China’s state propaganda organ Global Times, China clearly signals how it would like the crisis to end. It is entitled ‘Divisive US politics leads to democracy’s fast decay’.
It has now been six weeks since herd immunity was rejected, but it’s been happening in the background nonetheless. As Professor Ioannides of Stanford University has recently reported, based on serological tests for the presence of antibodies, the actual infection rate in the population may be 50 – 85x higher than the number of documented cases. The problem the UK now faces is how to quietly return to this strategy without alarming the public, having rejected it once for being too dangerous. Only with a holistic view of the costs and benefits of different policy choices we can make sensible decisions.
Further Reading
‘Herd immunity might still be key in the fight against coronavirus‘ by Matt Strauss, The Spectator, March 26th 2020
‘The free will of cavemen, herd immunity and the value of contrarian truth‘ by Barry Norris, Argonaut, March 30th 2020
‘PM’s virus adviser warns Britain might still need to adopt herd immunity in its fight against coronavirus as lockdown measures have “painted the country into a corner”‘ by Jack Elsum and Daniel Hussain, Daily Mail, April 4th 2020
‘Is our fight against coronavirus worse than the disease‘ by David L Katz, New York Times, March 20th 2020
‘Infect Everyone: How Herd Immunity Could Work for Poor Countries‘ by Ari Altstedter, Bloomberg News, April 22nd 2020
‘Coronavirus dies out within 70 days no matter how we tackle it, claims professor‘ by Sarah Knapton and Dominic Gilbert, The Telegraph, The Telegraph, April 23rd 2020
‘India should protect elderly and take herd immunity plunge: Thomas Friedman‘, India Today, April 28th 2020
Further Viewing
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The WHO is warning that survival of COVID-19 does not necessary confer immunity, and a recent University of Buckingham study, among others, shows that some survivors, particularly at the younger end of the population, were found to have very low to zero SARS-CoV-2 antibody levels. However, if an individual survived it once then I’d say there’s a pretty good chance they can survive it again. In the light of this, the pathology I eventually expect to see exposed is that the younger population, with a stronger base immune system, is able to fight off the infection without producing antibodies, and it is only as people age that they need to produce antibodies to give their immune system a leg up.
Sarah Gilbert the Oxford vaccines expert was on the Marr show this morning. She said something along the lines of “The virus is very good at covering its tracks and not leaving much of a memory in the patient’s immune system”. Even she couldn’t say how long any antibodies or immunity would persist for. On the other hand, her vaccine provokes a much stronger immune response.
It’s looking to me as though antibody testing for the natural infection is increasingly going to be portrayed as a red herring. And natural herd immunity likewise – whether or not it is actually the case that there is sufficient natural immunity in the population to suppress the spread of the virus. The only thing that will satisfy these people is a universal vaccine that produces a clear, unambiguous marker to show that the citizen has complied with the state’s processing directives.
Vaccines are a good thing, not a conspiracy. As soon as there is a COVID-19 vaccine I will be finding a way to get it. But until there is a vaccine I want normal life, with the slightly increased chance of death from the virus, not some lockdown limbo of lost rights and poverty.
Even if it hasn’t gone through proper efficacy testing ?
Surely if it’s not leaving much of a fingerprint in most people, that simply means that the antibody positives we do have are lower bounds? Given that antibody testing has found surprisingly high numbers in most of the studies thus found, isn’t that more proof that we’re closer to herd immunity and all the govt needs to do is manage the infection rate gently, not lock us down until a vaccine?
Well you won’t improve upon the immunity given by the natural virus. Vaccination is at best an imitation of the natural process. I would be be very wary of any claim that anyone’s vaccine offered better protection than having had the virus.
This lockdown is not about public safety, it’s about public control.California’s covid19 death numbers are a minuscule fraction of our state’s 40 Million population, yet the Newsom Lockdowns have been a five month imprisonment. He just announced schools won’t open. And the mask policy is lunacy.
When an epidemic strikes and containment has failed, herd immunity is the inevitable outcome. But it makes sense to try and manage it. Reducing the rate of infection by intervening allows us to minimise the total number of people who get infected, reduce the peak number of infections and buy ourselves time.
But it only makes sense if we have a clear view of when the epidemic struck. A Cambridge University study shows that the virus has been around in humans since mid September 2019. Some British universities have exchange programmes with Chinese universities, including Wuhan Institute of Technology. Students at UK universities returned to work around 25 September 2019.
Basing policy on modelling is a very bad idea if the data is flawed.
In this case, the data may very well be completely out of whack if the virus came to this country in September 2019 or shortly thereafter.
My feeling is that it has indeed spread far more widely than we’ve been led to believe: a friend recently told me that she’d experienced fatigue, headache and troublesome cough for about a fortnight, but thought no more about it.
Admittedly, she doesn’t follow the Covid news with any great interest, but nevertheless.
She is quite well, but obviously hasn’t been tested .
If many people have indeed had a few coughs and recovered ,isn’t it likely that Covid has been with us for some time and that many folk have not been troubled unduly?
It now appears that most deaths have struck those who are already ill, very old and frail, significantly obese and living in crowded households.
My small town is dying; businesses are closing, children are bored, young people are facing a bleak future.
Surely the lockdown could be eased to allow those of us who would prefer to resume a resemblance of normal life to take our chances, while nursing homes and the like continue to receive protection.
The economic and social consequences are becoming increasingly dire and the media continues to produce alarming bulletins.
Isn’t it likely that this virus will mutate and become less lethal?
A pathogen will achieve greater long term success if it doesn’t wipe out its hosts.
Finally, the rise in co- morbidity and opportunistic infections is manifesting, as many of us predicted: dental infections; missed cancer diagnoses; reduced screening programmes; diabetics missing essential podiatry appointments; anxiety and depression the inevitable results of loss of income and confinement in the home.
~Isn’t it likely that this virus will mutate and become less lethal?~
There were already two strains that came out of China, one was less lethal than the other. Now, testing has shown that the more lethal strain has almost totally usurped the weaker strain, worldwide.
I also know several people who had a nasty ‘flu-like’ illness early this year or late last. year, but they all survived even though they were all over 70, overweight etc.
I would contend that they contracted the weaker strain, with the more lethal strain coming from Lombardy, Italy (the Lombardy strain is the more lethal version) arriving in the UK in March.
Thirteen gorillas test positive for Covid at Atlanta zoo
Published on September 15, 2021
Written by The Guardia
Western lowland gorillas are believed to have caught the virus from a zookeeper claim ‘zoo officials’.
More than a dozen gorillas have tested positive for Covid-19 at Zoo Atlanta, probably after contracting the virus from a keeper, zoo officials said.
Staff were alerted when several of the zoo’s troop of 20 western lowland gorillas began exhibiting symptoms, including runny noses, mild coughing and loss of appetite.
Fecal samples and swabs sent to the University of Georgia’s veterinary diagnostic laboratory showed that 13 of the great apes were positive for coronavirus, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
In a statement posted to the zoo’s website, officials said they believed a vaccinated member of its animal care team, who was wearing personal protective equipment and asymptomatic when she came to work, probably transmitted the virus.
“The teams are very closely monitoring the affected gorillas and are hopeful they will make a complete recovery,” Sam Rivera, Zoo Atlanta’s senior director of animal health, said.
Further tests sent to the national veterinary services laboratory in Ames, Iowa, for confirmation, were pending, the statement added. Some of the gorillas are receiving monoclonal antibodies, and staff are paying close attention to Ozzie, a 60-year-old male thought to be most at risk of Covid complications.
Zoo Atlanta’s gorillas live in close proximity to each other in four groups, making it impossible to isolate them individually. As they recover, they will receive the Zoetis coronavirus vaccine developed for veterinary use, the statement said.
Other animals at Zoo Atlanta that will receive the vaccine in the coming days will include Bornean and Sumatran orangutans, Sumatran tigers, African lions, and a clouded leopard.
In February, San Diego Zoo announced that all eight of its lowland gorillas who had contracted Covid-19 a few weeks earlier, including Winston, a 49-year-old male, had made a full recovery.
The California zoo also reported in July that its two endangered snow leopards had coronavirus, but were responding well to treatment.
See more here: theguardian.com Header image: The Daily Mail
Me: So much for “herd immunity”
Former Pfizer VP: 0.84% ‘Clear evidence of fraud’ in Pfizer study claiming 95% efficacy
posted by Mordechai Sones September 30, 2021 10:58 am
America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) Chief Science Officer Dr. Michael Yeadon yesterday said there is “clear evidence of fraud” in the Pfizer study that purports to claim 95% efficacy in their COVID-19 “vaccine”.
Yeadon was commenting on an article appearing in The Lancet and critiquing a documentary that scrutinized a Pfizer efficacy study, calling the distinction raised therein between relative risk reduction and absolute risk reduction “accurate”.
The Lancet article, entitled COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and effectiveness—the elephant (not) in the room, says that although attention has focused on vaccine efficacy and comparing the reduction of the number of symptomatic cases, “fully understanding the efficacy and effectiveness of vaccines is less straightforward than it might seem. Depending on how the effect size is expressed, a quite different picture might emerge.”
The article continues: “Vaccine efficacy is generally reported as a relative risk reduction (RRR). It uses the relative risk (RR)—ie, the ratio of attack rates with and without a vaccine—which is expressed as 1–RR. Ranking by reported efficacy gives relative risk reductions of 95% for the Pfizer–BioNTech, 94% for the Moderna–NIH, 91% for the Gamaleya, 67% for the J&J, and 67% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford vaccines.
“However, RRR should be seen against the background risk of being infected and becoming ill with COVID-19, which varies between populations and over time. Although the RRR considers only participants who could benefit from the vaccine, the absolute risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between attack rates with and without a vaccine, considers the whole population. ARRs tend to be ignored because they give a much less impressive effect size than RRRs: 1·3% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford, 1·2% for the Moderna–NIH, 1·2% for the J&J, 0·93% for the Gamaleya, and 0·84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.”
“Pfizer reported that its vaccine showed a 95% efficacy,” explained the documentary, entitled COVID Shot or Not? “That sounds like it protects you 95% of the time. But that’s not actually what that number means.
“That 95% refers to the ‘relative risk reduction’ (RRR), but it doesn’t tell you how much your overall risk is reduced by vaccination. For that, we need ‘absolute risk reduction’ (ARR).
“In the Pfizer trial, 8 out of 18,198 people who were given the vaccine developed COVID-19. In the unvaccinated placebo group, 162 people out of 18,325 got it, which means that even without the vaccine, the risk of contracting COVID-19 was extremely low, at 0.88%, which the vaccine then reduced to 0.04%.
“So the net benefit, the absolute risk reduction, that you are being offered in the Pfizer vaccine in 0.84%
“That 95% number? That refers to the relative difference between the 0.88% and 0.04%. That’s what they call ‘95% relative risk reduction’. And relative risk reduction is well-known to be a misleading number, which is why the FDA recommends using absolute risk reduction instead. Which begs the question: How many people would have chosen to take the COVID-19 vaccines, had they understood that they offered less than 1% benefit?”
In response, Dr. Yeadon said: “It’s worse, actually. In the Pfizer study from which the 95% claim comes, there’s clear evidence of fraud.
“Why do I say that? Well, a study which is properly blinded means neither the subject, the study director, nor any other actor knows what each patient has received.
“Patients in clinical trials are obligated to follow ‘the protocol’, which specifies must-dos & prohibitions.
“If it’s blind to the end, how could one group end up with five times as many subjects having their data pulled prior to statistical analysis in the test group compared with the control group?”
Yeadon expanded: “The story of how a large state within India solved its COVID-19 crisis is no surprise to those of us who’ve known since spring 2020 that our governments, media, and tech titans have been acting against our interests, both health as well as democratic.
“We’ve known, for example, that highly qualified physicians and scientists are well able to treat and save most people infected by SARS-CoV-2.
“The methodology is simple: Attack the virus and the inflammatory and ultimately thrombotic disease phases rationally by administering targeted, multi drug treatments.
“These include Vitamin C and Vitamin D but in particular, Ivermectin, zinc and a zinc ionophore such as one of several old antibiotics like azithromycin.
“Used in sequence depending on the presentation, in excess of 80% of patients avoid hospitalization anddeath, including in cohorts we regard as at high risk.
Too long for this page, but I hope you get the idea
Richard
Should We Reconsider Herd Immunity?
No need to reconsider it. It’s happened. Pretty much ALL of our responses were of no value – lockdown isolation did not seem to stop the spread – masks are useless, and the vaccine is ESTIMATED to have provided workable bloodstream antibodies for a matter of weeks (while damaging many people as a side effect)
Closing an entire island country seems to have been the only fairly effective defence – Taiwan and New Zealand have low numbers of cases, but that simply puts off the day when you have to accept the rest of the world, and in the meantime everyone’s immune systems are rusty from being unused.
Herd immunity is now working, and the pandemic is over. There will not be any study of what mistakes we made – that would be too embarrassing….