Way back in 2020 our authorities were pushing heavily the idea of herd immunity for Covid – that is, through vaccination (well, and natural infection) we will all become resistant to the virus and it would simply disappear, just as happened with smallpox (and no other viral disease, despite many vaccines being available for many diseases). Of course, the more likely outcome of herd immunity would be a significant reduction in cases without eradication of the virus.
But what’s all this about ‘herd immunity’?
On the face of it, herd immunity is quite simple. Once enough of a population has gained immunity to a disease, whether by natural infection or by use of an effective vaccine, then the disease dies out and is no longer a threat. However, it is somewhat more nuanced than this. The important factor is really the number of people that each infected individual passes the disease on to. When the number of individuals susceptible to the disease decreases such that each infected person infects, on average, less than one other individual then the disease will die out in that area. Of course, it doesn’t mean the disease will go extinct – it might remain viable in animal reservoirs or in other areas with lower immunity levels – but once the point is reached where there are sufficiently few susceptible individuals then the disease passes into a new stage typified by sporadic localised self-limiting outbreaks.
This brings us to the mathematical characterisation of ‘herd immunity’. The point at which the number of susceptible individuals falls just below the level required for an outbreak of a disease is the ‘herd immunity threshold’, which can be described by a nice simple equation for situations where there is perfect immunity to the disease following infection or vaccination:
Herd Immunity Threshold = 100 × (1 – 1/R0)
Where R0 is the basic reproduction number (the doubling rate in a population with no immunity to the disease).
It is this simple equation that created all of the estimates of the levels of vaccination required to ‘make Covid go away’ that we were bombarded with in 2020.
The WHO estimated in January 2020 that the R0 of Covid was between 1.4 and 2.5. But estimates of R0 during these early days of the pandemic were quite varied, ranging between around 1.5 and 6.8, giving herd immunity thresholds of somewhere between 33% and 85%. This unhelpfully large range was narrowed down by the modelling team at Imperial College, which decided that the R0 of Covid was around 2.6 (giving a herd immunity threshold of 62%). By September the Imperial modellers had settled on an R0 of about 2.5, giving a herd immunity threshold of 60%. This estimate appears to have driven the reporting of the numbers required to get vaccinated to eliminate Covid that appeared during autumn 2020.
The trouble with the simple herd immunity threshold equation shown above is that it assumes that vaccines and natural immunity offer complete protection from infection and onwards transmission. The full equation for the threshold is given by:
Herd Immunity Threshold = 100 × (1 – 1/R0)/ε
Where ε is the effectiveness of vaccination or natural infection in protecting against onwards transmission.
This substantially more nuanced equation for the herd immunity threshold appears to have been ignored in the reporting to the population of the levels of vaccination required to rid countries of Covid. This was despite there being an understanding that infection with a ‘traditional coronavirus’ type cold doesn’t confer long term immunity, the failure of prior attempts to create coronavirus vaccines and the imperfect performance of vaccination to protect against some other common respiratory tract infections (e.g. the influenza vaccines).
Applying this equation to a vaccine with 50% effectiveness (the goal of the vaccine programmes) and an R0 of 2.5 (the assumption in official U.K. modelling for the latter half of 2020) gives a required herd immunity threshold of 120%. As you can’t vaccinate more than 100% of the population, this is impossible. Yet, even given this information the push for herd immunity via high levels of vaccination continued, helped by the weekly reporting in the UKHSA’s Vaccine Surveillance Report of the proportion of the population that had been vaccinated.
Of course, not only was the concept of herd immunity doomed from the start, but as each week went by the vaccination campaign started to target ever lower age ranges, coupled with ever higher estimates of R0 to support the increased proportion of the population required to be vaccinated. When the Alpha (Kent) variant appeared it was estimated to have an R0 of around 4.2, giving a herd immunity threshold with a perfect vaccine of 76%; the Delta variant had an estimated R0 of about 7, giving a herd immunity threshold with a perfect vaccine of 86%. Of course, these higher R0 values meant that, even assuming a perfect vaccine, herd immunity couldn’t be reached without vaccinating children, and so youngsters were next in line to get jabbed. The decreasing vaccine effectiveness during this time was ignored in these herd immunity calculations.
What was surprising about the reporting of the vaccination rates and the slow progression towards the purported ‘herd immunity threshold’ was the lack of consideration of the impact of natural infection. Even when natural infection was mentioned, it was usually to point out that there was only a short term protection from infection offered by natural infection, unlike the vaccines which we were told offered magnificent protection. This strange state of affairs continues to this day, with countries such as the USA requiring two doses of Covid vaccine to enter the country, with no consideration of the longer term protection offered by natural infection nor of the impact of rapid vaccine waning or vaccine escape variants.
There’s an additional impact of the contribution of natural infection to herd immunity. Given that healthy younger individuals were and are much less likely to suffer from severe Covid, there was an argument to be made for allowing children and young adults to become infected with Covid rather than relying on vaccination. Furthermore, as the key period was summertime in 2021 there was also a natural (seasonal) lowering of the rates of severe Covid (possibly due to vitamin D levels – another aspect of Covid ignored by our authorities). Instead, the younger individuals in our population were subjected to rather stringent lockdowns, with strict restrictions on schooling, the cancelling of music festivals and the restriction of students to their accommodation. Moreover, when young people did have the audacity to enjoy themselves they were lambasted by the media as being selfish. I have long thought the opposite and that it was the older age groups that were selfish. Social interaction is very important during our younger years – this is when we learn to be adults and also partake in important social activities such as the down-selection of future life partners – and so the relative suffering imparted by the social deprivation of lockdowns was greater for the younger generations. I’ve suggested in the past that those aged over 50 should have stood outside one Thursday evening and clapped and banged pans to give public thanks for the sacrifices made by the young for the old during Covid. However most of those in older age groups remain ignorant of the sacrifices made for their sake by the young over the last three years.
Herd immunity is a reasonable goal for many diseases and vaccines, but it also has a dark side, particularly for rapidly mutating RNA viruses where vaccines offer marginal protection. As the proportion of the population with immunity conferred by vaccination increases, the evolutionary pressure for the virus also changes to focus on overcoming vaccine immunity. Even worse, if the immune protection is limited to a very specific part of the virus (as with the viral-vector and mRNA vaccines), this evolutionary pressure will be even more targeted. The entire vaccinated population (save those previously infected) will have a very similar immune protection (immunised against identical viral proteins), compared with the unvaccinated-and-infected who will have the more complex immune protection against the whole virus and also potentially against non-identical variants. Thus in the event of a vaccine escape mutation creating a new variant, those with immunity from natural infection will be relatively more likely to have some maintained protection compared with the vaccinated.
The impact of this effect can even be modelled using equations derived from the herd immunity equations as given above. Indeed, in a simplistic case the equation is identical. Consider a hypothetical situation with a population having received a vaccine with 100% vaccine effectiveness and the rest gaining immunity from natural infection (also 100% effective for this example). A vaccine resistant strain emerges that doesn’t impact on natural immunity (this is unlikely, but the example is for the extreme case). In this situation the original herd immunity threshold equation will apply but ‘in reverse’, i.e., in this case the herd protection will be conferred by those with immunity after natural infection and it is these individuals that will protect the vaccinated. To put some numbers on this, if the new vaccine escape variant has an R0 of 4, then if over 75% of the population remain unvaccinated but are previously infected (i.e., 100 x (1 – 1/R0) = 75%) then their immune protection will stifle the spread of the new vaccine escape variant and help keep the vaccinated (vulnerable to the vaccine escape variant) protected. In this simplistic example, once vaccination levels exceed 25% then this protection will fail (assuming all the vaccinated have no natural immunity and all the unvaccinated have natural immunity) and the vaccinated will spread the vaccine resistant strain until the population overall achieves the herd immunity threshold via natural infection.
Reality is, of course, much more complex than the example above. Considerations have to be made for the relative effective reproduction number of the original and vaccine escape variants in the unvaccinated and vaccinated populations. However, the general concept remains – a population with high levels of vaccination with an imperfect vaccine can be more likely to spread vaccine resistant variants than populations with lower vaccination coverage in conditions where the unvaccinated have high levels of natural immunity. It is likely that through universal vaccination we have encouraged vaccine escape variants to occur that wouldn’t have arisen if we had only vaccinated the most vulnerable – as then the selective pressure on the virus would have been to evade a complex natural immunity, not the highly heterogeneous vaccine immunity. Yet again, the goal of universal vaccination to achieve herd immunity looks like it might actually be a false idol to worship.
I’d note that we don’t normally worry about the above – most vaccines offer high levels of protection against disease and also are either based on an inactivated virus (complex immune protection against many proteins in the virus, some of which will mutate slowly) or are based on viral proteins that mutate slowly (in the case of most protein subunit vaccines). It is only in the case of the Covid vaccines that we chose a small portion of the virus that happens to be highly mutable, thus resulting in the problem of rapid vaccine escape being near inevitable.
There’s another complication related to herd immunity thresholds that can be an important consideration for vaccination policy: the role of community infections while below the herd immunity threshold in naturally boosting immunity. The great example of this that has come to light in recent years is the strange situation of chickenpox that appears to have arisen in the USA.
Chickenpox is an unpleasant though largely benign disease that occurs mainly in children. It is more unpleasant in adults, but the vast majority of individuals catch chickenpox as a child and gain lifelong immunity. Thus adult chickenpox is a relatively rare disease. However, chickenpox has a dark side. The virus that causes chickenpox, varicella zoster virus (one of the herpes viruses) remains in the body after infection, quietly residing dormant in certain nerve cells until a point, many years later, when the virus becomes reactivated causing a painful neurological inflammation that we call shingles.
Way back in the mid 1990s the USA started vaccinating children against chickenpox. There were arguably some reasons in favour of this, including trying to prevent the relatively small numbers of hospitalisations and deaths from childhood chickenpox that occur each year in the USA. There are rare serious side-effects that arise from the chickenpox vaccine, but the U.S. authorities’ assessments suggested a net positive outcome, and so the vaccination programme was started. And it worked – chickenpox rates slowed significantly in the years following the vaccination programme, and some hospitalisations and deaths were averted. Even with a fairly high rate of breakthrough infections (around 10% to 20% of the vaccinated go on to catch chickenpox later in life), when breakthrough infections do occur they tend to be mild and have a much lower risk of hospitalisation than otherwise. As a result, the U.S. health agencies considered their childhood chickenpox vaccination programme a success.
But then in the early 2010s a new phenomenon started to be reported – a significant increase in the incidence of shingles since the onset of the vaccination programme, particularly in non-elderly adults.
According to the natural boosting theory, what has happened is that adults who had caught chickenpox as a child kept their immunity ‘topped up’ by repeated exposure to the chickenpox virus from infected children throughout their lives. However, once all the children were vaccinated the incidence of this ‘topping up’ effect reduced significantly. After a few years this lack of repeated ‘topping up’ of immunity resulted in the latent virus being able to flare up, and as a result shingles rates rose significantly. Thus the unexpected impact of the childhood vaccination programme appears to be a significant increase in shingles in adults. Fortunately, this effect should only last for 40-60 years, at which point all those individuals who were vaccinated as a child should have much lower incidence rates of shingles as their childhood vaccination will have protected them from getting the disease in the first place. Or perhaps it won’t – we just don’t know (yet). In the meantime, the U.S. authorities are keen to point out that the problem of adult shingles rates increasing can be partially resolved by giving all adults not vaccinated as children the shingles vaccine – so a problem caused by vaccines can be resolved through the use of more vaccines. A bit of a win-win for the pharmaceutical industry.
I should state here that the above isn’t accepted by everyone – some say that the rise in cases of shingles since the mid-90s is a coincidence, and it is actually due to other reasons. Nevertheless, the scientific basis of the ‘top up’ theory is sound and it illustrates how complex immune effects can turn out to be.
I must also note here that this appears to be unrelated to the dramatic increase in shingles cases from spring 2021 – this phenomenon isn’t explained by childhood vaccination for chickenpox and remains baffling to doctors and scientists.
So far the evidence is that for Covid the introduction of mass vaccination has coincided with significantly increased Covid incidence rates, so it is unlikely that we’ll see an effect of ‘reduced immune top-up’ similar to that seen after mass vaccination for chickenpox. However, it is possible that the effect of lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 has been to reduce this ‘immune top up’ for various common diseases. Indeed, this is exactly the mechanism proposed by our authorities to explain the significant increase in respiratory tract infections we’re currently seeing (earlier in the year than is usual). I’m not convinced that it is the entire reason (I suggest that there’s also some negative impact on the immune system from Covid itself or the vaccines), however it is likely that it has had some effect. It is strange that they didn’t warn of this negative impact of lockdowns at the time, or that it isn’t usually mentioned as a possible consequence of mass vaccination campaigns.
Before I close, I must state that I believe for many vaccines and viruses high levels of vaccination is a valid goal. I suggest that our approach to mass vaccination of children has effectively eradicated many diseases that resulted in the high child mortality rates of the past, and ‘herd immunity’ means that those that cannot receive a vaccine are protected from infection with these specific diseases. I know that many will disagree with this and I expect some negative comments as a result – but what’s important is that people are allowed to disagree and that the most healthy situation is that we can have a discussion. The one thing I am sure of is that suppression of alternative opinions and the rule of the ‘voice of authority’ is a very negative road to go down.
Next time I’ll discuss the other side of the data on herd immunity – the section of the Vaccine Surveillance Reports reporting antibody levels in the population.
Amanuensis is an ex-academic and senior Government scientist. He blogs at Bartram’s Folly – subscribe here.
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Like your previous one on HI, an excellent and very important piece and explanation. And one written simple enough that even politicians, PHOs and Roy Anderson should be able to understand it and their Covid follies/crimes.
I suppose he/they would probably and idiotically interpret a resulting HIT of over 100%, or an even negative one in case of negative VE as we seem to have now, just as an expression of the need and the frequency of boosters.
Personally, I have become more sceptical about the general and childhood vaccination success narrative, but I am by no means an absolutist and could not agree more with your concluding sentences anyway.
Keep in my mind though, that as per Merrian-Webster’s current definition of anti-vaxxer, one is now considered to be one, if one questioned the success of a single vaccine or the need for even a single of the many vaccine mandates.
So, firmly count me in that camp now.
“suppression of alternative opinions and the rule of the ‘voice of authority’ is a very negative road to go down.” I think you’ll find that Jacinda Ardern, Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, Emanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen know better.
My primary takeaway from this is that public health authorities decided to do away with science and replace it with political soundbites and witch doctoring. Your herd immunity threshold of 120% made me giggle – I immediately thought “they did better than that – NL’s vaxx uptake was around 87% for the population over 12, with a booster, they obviously thought they got it up to 174%” (here they let kids under 12 do their thing, so let us assume virtually all under-12s were long ago infected with the lurgy).
The whole idea of herd immunity was absurd even to a layperson, if they could be bothered to switch on their brain. Only 1 part of the virus in the vaxx, vaxx did not work particularly well on the elderly and immunocompromised (Israeli data on the 3rd vaxx trials boasted they produced ‘more’ antibodies than before – but still much lower than necessary), plus we knew that many different animals (besides bats and pangolins) could carry the lurgy, meaning there would always be a reservoir.
Re your point on some vaccines doing some good – this may well be true, but what is your take on the ever-increasing number of vaccines that they are shoving into children? I don’t have children, so I never thought about it, only recently have I looked at the vaxx schedules (particularly the U$ one) and was shocked at the number of vaxxes they burden young, developing immune systems with. Common sense says this can’t be right, how can an immune system develop normally with all the chemical garbage being injected.
On a somewhat unrelated note, check out the most recent “hospital/ICU admissions + vaxx status report” of the RIVM. They didn’t publish one in October and the one published last week had me laughing out loud. The previous ones had huge tables at the end of the report, giving detailed breakdowns comparing various vaxx statuses and age groups. Now – all lumped together in one big total (with unvaxxed entirely excluded), showing a fab relative risk reduction, the lie of which is demonstrated in the pretty graphs in the same report, showing higher admissions for 3x and 4x vaxxed.
The vaccines certainly seem to have a muted effect on the older immune system (which is to be expected, as the reason they ‘are vulnerable’ is because they’re less able to produce an effective immune response to a challenge, whether from disease or vaccine).
Re. childhood vaccination — I think we’re putting too much onto them, with uncertain impact. I’m certainly less keen on giving them vaccines where the impact of disease is less than profound (ie, low ifr in the healthy).
It is well recognised that individuals and society as a whole have different perceptions of risk and what they are prepared to tolerate (https://www.onr.org.uk/documents/tolerability.pdf). In the mix are factors such as whether the hazard is voluntary/involuntary, the level of control, whether the risk is new or familiar, etc. For example, people seem to be ‘relaxed’ about the thousands of deaths and serious injuries from RTAs but would never tolerate a fraction of that number lost through air accidents.
This important human aspect doesn’t appear to be weighed by health authorities in deciding on mass vaccination programmes. The emotional cost of vaccine damage, particularly in the case of children, does not have a 1:1 equivalence in human terms between suffering a serious outcome from a disease randomly contracted, and actively subjecting your healthy child to a vaccine and being one of the unlucky ones.
Both scenarios may well result in death but IMO the emotional cost to the parents is dramatically different between such cases; that human element urgently needs to be factored into cost-benefit analyses for vaccine programmes. Difficult to know what the appropriate factor should be but polling the public would be a start.
The childhood vaccination schedules have blown out of sight, children are subject to an ever-increasing vaccine load. This is an area that is awash with conflicts of interest…
Re vaccines and the older immune system, see my email to Peter Openshaw and Arne Akbar: Is it ethical to vaccinate the young to purportedly protect the old? 6 September 2022.
“… I must state that I believe for many vaccines and viruses high levels of vaccination is a valid goal. I suggest that our approach to mass vaccination of children has effectively eradicated many diseases that resulted in the high child mortality rates of the past, and ‘herd immunity’ means that those that cannot receive a vaccine are protected from infection with these specific diseases.”
That’s a perfectly valid view and one I would have agreed with until recently. However, what is clear is that there is a dearth of research into adverse effects of the childhood vaccine programme. The vaccine manufacturers steadfastly refuse to undertake RCTs with an inert placebo in the control group, or to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated groups in a natural experiment. Therefore we cannot rule out the possibility that the serious decline in young people’s health, such as allergies and behavioural problems, is due to the vaccine programme. Until such time as this research is undertaken, we are all taking a guess.
Yes. I wondered whether, using the example of the chicken pox vaxx, there had been a comparison of the reduction in hospitalisations/deaths thanks to the vaxx, to any hospitalisations/deaths due to adverse effects from the vaxx. They may well not be that far apart. There must also be a comparison of the avoided costs of hospitalisation to the costs of inoculating millions of kids every year. I can imagine that vaxxing may cost more than hospitalisation. And yes, one wants to avoid a child ending up in hospital, but funds must be taken into account in terms of health care availability for everyone.
Re Chickenpox vaccine (in USA).
The studies that have been done suggest a net benefit. I’d like to see more research, but that’s what we’ve got for now.
Re the cost-benefit analysis — again, that shows a net benefit, but I don’t think they take proper account of longer term effects.
Not read the full article yet but I also disagree with the bit you highlighted and agree with what you’re saying. I was born mid ’70s and many of the vaccines that kids in the UK get now weren’t in existence then. We just got exposed to these viruses as kids, recovered, then were no worse off for it. Measles, mumps, chicken pox and German measles were all common viruses to pick up years ago and I knew of not a single person who had lasting ill-effects or who died. Important to note that I didn’t live in a slum or in poverty with no sanitation and malnutrition was not a concern. So I can see how these childhood viruses would be problematic living in third world countries with third world problems.
And if the vaccinations were so imperative to have for kids now, living in first world countries without the above issues to worry about, then why aren’t people born before these vaccines existed, such as me and older folk, dropping like flies from these viruses and having our lives shortened significantly? Well obviously we had functional immune systems which saw off these pathogens and we became more robust of health as a result. In a nut shell; if vaccines are being billed as the be all and end all of acquiring immunity and were imperative for not getting severely ill or dying, then how come mankind didn’t die out waaay before the dawn of modern medicine? Something tells me we wouldn’t have been much cop as a species and lived through all of the hardships if we died at the first exposure to a circulating virus. There’s no sense whatsoever in reinventing the wheel or exposing your body to toxins that are completely unnecessary. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
Growing up in the late 50s/early 60’s, I too seemed to catch everything going as the bugs circulated the school every winter. Measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough – the list is long. I think it has left me with a pretty strong immune system, I rarely catch colds, haven’t had covid either despite my total and flagrant ignoring of all covid b*****ks.
The mention of shingles is interesting, as I developed it in August 2020 despite being in otherwise good health (not run down). Then another family member had it as well. Asking around, it surprised me how common shingles was that summer – and obviously nothing to do with covid ‘vaccines’ either. It has been suggested to me that it was brought on by stress (more likely anger actually, which is still with me). This sounds like a reasonable explanation.
It’s notable that in the UK, chickenpox vaccination is not part of the National Health Service (NHS) childhood vaccination program.
The NHS says:
“There’s a worry that introducing chickenpox vaccination for all children could increase the risk of chickenpox and shingles in adults.”
and
“Being exposed to chickenpox as an adult (for example, through contact with infected children) boosts your immunity to shingles. If you vaccinate children against chickenpox, you lose this natural boosting, so immunity in adults will drop and more shingles cases will occur.”
So by interfering with chickenpox vaccination, it seems a mild disease of childhood has been exchanged for a more severe disease in old age…
Interesting to think about what can go wrong when interfering with the natural way of things…
To be fair, morbidity resulting in hospitalisation aand mortality from diseases like measles is not insignificant. While most of us survived, a few unfortunate individuals don’t. However, taking decisions about the net benefit of vaccines is like running a business only seeing one half of the balance sheet. That is the real issue here – we just don’t know what the detriment from vaccines is because we don’t look, and in the few cases where research is undertaken, the presentation of the findings is incredibly biased. I wonder where we’ve seen that before.
I know of more people who suffered severe complications, including brain damage, from childhood vaccines than who suffered severe complications or fatality from the actual diseases – zero in fact.
I’ll share my anecdote…
I was born in 1959 in London. My mother recalls me having measles around 18 months of age (this would have been in 1961, and is unlikely to be laboratory verified…)
She was a young mother, only 19 years old and I was her first child. She was shocked to see her baby covered in spots and called the doctor to the house. My mother recalls the doctor said I had measles, but told her not to worry, they would just run their course (a rather more benign message than we receive nowadays…)
My mother said the spots lasted about ten days and I did not seem to be too adversely affected. She said “it did not put you off your food in any way” and “you used to sleep right through the night from 10.00 pm to 6.00 am.”
In 2012 I had serological testing to check my immunity for measles, mumps and rubella. According to these tests I understand I’m ‘protected’. Presumably I have natural immunity to measles due to having this disease as a child? Somehow I must have had exposure to mumps too, but I do not recall having obvious symptoms of this disease. It’s likely I had rubella vaccination as a girl.
Measles is an interesting one.
I believe that there’s almost certainly a net positive effect of vaccinating children for measles.
However, I’ll add a bit…
I do wonder what the impact has been of reducing the ‘immune top up’ effect for adults, and mothers in particular — I’d imagine that there is relatively little in the way of maternal protection for measles offered to children, even where they breastfeed. It is possible that we’ve actually created a situation where children need to be vaccinated for measles because there is absolutely no immunity against measles that’ll come from anywhere else. There’s a risk that if we stopped vaccinating children against measles then that generation would be highly susceptible to getting serious symptomatic disease on infection with measles, resulting in much worse outcomes than we used to see before vaccination (where there was strong maternal protection in the first few years of life, along with exposure to low virus levels in the environment that were sufficiently dealt with by the innate immune system and thus didn’t result in disease, but where there was some priming of the adaptive immune system to cope with a ‘full on’ infection later in childhood).
Yes amanuensis, measles is an interesting one…
On what evidence do you believe “that there’s almost certainly a net positive effect of vaccinating children for measles”?
Re maternal protection for measles offered to children, see for example my BMJ rapid response: Measles vaccination – is anyone worried about shorter term maternally derived antibodies via vaccinated mothers? 29 October 2018.
Also see my BMJ rapid response: Universal measles vaccination – “well worth the risk of reduced transplacental immunity and increased vulnerability in adults…”? 11 November 2018.
amanuensis you say:
That’s pretty scary to think about isn’t it?
Considering people’s right to natural immunity, consider the startling admission by Heidi Larson, Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project, during the WHO Global Vaccine Safety Summit held in December 2019, i.e.
Seems to me it’s diabolical to implement vaccinations, e.g. Covid jabs, against ailments most people can deal with effectively with their natural immune response.
I included the quote from Heidi Larson in my BMJ rapid response: Is it ethical to impede access to natural immunity? The case of SARS-CoV2, 25 March 2020.
I was born early 50s. Just about everyone – it was all round the school – me included, got the array of childhood diseases by the age of 10.
I too knew of nobody who died or ended up in hospital.
Most of these diseases only killed a small proportion of children (overall mortality was maybe a third of children by the age of 5, but that includes malnutrition and getting stuck up chimneys), so as long as there were sufficient children being born mankind managed to survive as a species.
I agree.
Given the ease with which ‘big data’ analysis can be done these days, there’s no reason to not be doing matched cohort analysis of every vaccine out there, including annual vaccines (influenza). This should include side effects as well (again, this could be readily done for any side effect that involves the individual seeking healthcare).
In ‘Turtles’ the authors suggest that it is inconceivable that nobody has done such research given the ready availability of the data sets. Given that they have not been published, we can deduct that the results were unpalatable.
I imagine that this could well be the case, yes.
Quite a few small scale studies have been done.
Read “Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies”, which summarises over 400 papers on the subject.
But, as is self evident no mass studies have ever been done.
Orr, should I say, the results ever published.
‘Amanuensis’ says: “I must state that I believe for many vaccines and viruses high levels of vaccination is a valid goal. I suggest that our approach to mass vaccination of children has effectively eradicated many diseases that resulted in the high child mortality rates of the past, and ‘herd immunity’ means that those that cannot receive a vaccine are protected from infection with these specific diseases.”
Can you please elaborate on this statement – specifically which vaccines and viruses are you referring to?
A selection:
Measles vaccine is almost certainly net benefit.
Smallpox vaccine (vaccinia) almost certainly worked very well, albeit with fairly high side effect rates. No need for it now, of course — although I’d suggest that the recent monkeypox outbreak has given far more people protection against smallpox (and other orthopox viruses) than we’ve been told. Opps. I meant mpox. Which reminds me, I must tend to my mpuzzle tree, have some mnuts as a snack and get the mwrench from the toolbox.
I recall adults with the consequences of polio (limps generally) were fairly common when started my career, and they’re much less common now. That said, the history of polio in the decades prior to the start of mass vaccination suggests that there’s a bit more to this than meets the eye. The polio vaccine is also complex because of the need to consider the risk of the disease with the attenuated polio vaccine. I’d say that it is probably net benefit, rising to near certain net benefit if the child spends time in a country with endemic polio.
Rubella is complicated because the benefits primarily lie in pregnant woman and not childhood — I’ve not analysed the risks/benefits for this.
Mumps is possibly net positive. The benefits would be biased towards males. I’d like to see more research on this. The impact of the vaccine on the nervous system could do with more research.
TB vaccine (BCG) seems safe and probably has a net benefit in boosting the immune system (in general). The problem with it is that it doesn’t seem very effective at protecting against TB.
I’ve become very sceptical of whether the influenza vaccines offer any net benefit at all.
I’m fairly certain that if any malaria vaccine was deployed to a large proportion of the population for a given country that it would be likely to result in the rapid evolution of vaccine escape variants (5-10 year timescale) which could well be (likely IMO) more pathogenic (eg, see Gandon et al in Nature 414, 2001).
There’s a pretty strong hypothesis that Polio was caused by insecticides rather than the virus. The history of Polio and all of the contradictions in the evidence, such as it being more prevalent in the summer and autumn, and not correlated with hygeine is actually fascinating and does suggest that the standard explanation for the disease is lacking.
Yes — the historical data for polio are weird.
amanuensis, suggest you check out the book: Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History.
amanuensis re “Measles vaccine is almost certainly net benefit.”
I don’t agree. In my opinion the measles vaccine shouldn’t have been implemented.
Consider an article by Alexander D. Langmuir and Donald A. Henderson et al, published in 1962, i.e. The importance of measles as a health problem.
The article commences with this statement:
So far so good and so natural…but then Langmuir and Henderson et al say:
Langmuir and Henderson et al admit measles isn’t in the same category as heart disease, arthritis or mental disease, and not a matter of parental concern like poliomyelitis “in spite of relatively low incidence”.
But Langmuir and Henderson et al decide measles:
Langmuir and Henderson et al are keen to portray a child suffering with measles…but is this the general experience? My own anecdotal experience indicates it wasn’t that serious. And even if a child did have a fever and a cough, does this justify a vaccine intervention which may have other repercussions for health and natural immunity?
Langmuir and Henderson et al’s Figure 1 presents annual morbidity and mortality for the expanding reporting areas from 1912 to 1959, noting the stability of the morbidity rate and the steady downward trend in the mortality rate. They also note:
What do you think about this amanuensis? About the “ecological equilibrium of measles” being disrupted by vaccination?
Considering the modelling of Neil Ferguson et al out of Imperial College London, e.g. Report 9, dated 16 March 2020, which came out a few days after Patrick Vallance had announced the UK was going with a natural herd immunity response to Covid…so it seems Ferguson et al’s Report 9 put the kibosh on that…
Ferguson et al’s Report 9 suggested that Covid-19 was on a par with the 1918 flu pandemic, which is variously thought to have resulted in 50-100 million deaths…give or take 50 million.
Why did Ferguson et al compare Covid-19 with the 1918 flu pandemic, why not minor pandemics in 2009, 1976, 1968 or 1957/1958?
Ferguson et al’s Report 9 recommended ‘suppression’, aiming to “reverse epidemic growth” with the plan to restrict society (e.g. lockdowns) “until a vaccine becomes available”. It wasn’t disclosed in Report 9 that Neil Ferguson is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, arguably the most ardent promoter of vaccine products in the world. If this conflict of interest had been disclosed, perhaps Ferguson et al’s Report 9 would have been viewed more critically?
As it is, it’s incredible that Ferguson et al’s Report 9 was so easily influential and unquestioned, especially considering only a few days later, on 19 March 2020, Public Health England noted “COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK” as mortality rates were low overall.
So how on earth did the UK and other countries go ahead with lockdowns and restrictions, with devastating consequences for society and the economy, against a disease the WHO acknowledged at the time was generally mild for most people, especially for children and young adults?
Amanuensis: “I believe for many vaccines and viruses high levels of vaccination is a valid goal. I suggest that our approach to mass vaccination of children has effectively eradicated many diseases that resulted in the high child mortality rates of the past, and ‘herd immunity’ means that those that cannot receive a vaccine are protected from infection with these specific diseases.”
That may be true. However, Naturopaths have been saying for decades that childhood illnesses such as measles are not a danger to children who are properly nourished, living in sanitary conditions, not over-medicated, etc, and basically all that is needed to safely treat these acute illnesses is rest, little or no food, and let nature take its course without trying to suppress the illness.
And there have been independent long-term studies (obviously not funded by Big Pharma or their enablers) which have shown that unvaccinated children are healthier than vaccinated children. For example:
https://circleofdocs.com/studies-prove-without-doubt-that-unvaccinated-children-are-healthier-than-their-vaccinated-peers/
While I remain somewhat open-minded, I’m not going to blindly accept the shortsighted mantra of those with huge conflicts of interest, who refuse to invest in long-term studies, while nevertheless asserting that vaccines are “safe and effective”, with their policy of “Don’t seek and you will not find”.
Any graphs that I’ve looked at illustrate that deaths from these illness subsided when sanitation, healthcare ( think inception of the NHS ) and nutrition in society improved, which was long before any vaccine for these childhood vaccines became available. But the vaccines got all of the credit. Slums disappeared from UK society well before these vaccines became the norm for kids, so it goes without saying that improved living conditions played a huge part in improving the quality of life for people and child mortality would lessen as a result. So my understanding is that kids were dying less from these common illnesses before vaccines became available. And as I say, we’ve had vaccines for just the blink of an eye when you compare it to the length of time humans have existed. Shouldn’t we have been wiped out eons ago if we had no immunity, as the Native Americans were almost wiped out due to exposure to smallpox? To profess that any vaccine is superior to our innate immune system is just ridiculous in the extreme.
http://vaccinepapers.org/
There have been a number of studies concluding that unvaccinated children/adults suffer far less disease, and importantly auto immune disease than the unvaccinated.
For further proof/information read “Miller’s View of Critical Vaccine Studies”.
And, may I suggest take heed of the works by the great immunologist/virologist and Nobel prize winner, Sir Macfarlane Burnet.
If only that were compulsory reading for putative medics.
But, bigpharma has ensured and will continue to ensure that that will never happen.
It would destroy their business model at a stroke.
And don’t forget why the mRNA jabs have no need of the classic adjuvants (aka immunologists dirty little secret) – their inherent toxicity works just as well.
Long before the NHS.
And given our recent experience with fiddling the CoVid death figures, his confident can we be in the death rates attributed to childhood diseases?
While not disagreeing with the overall thrust of what you are saying, I’m not sure I buy your “human race wipe-out” logic. Even the Black Death, with a fatality rate of around 50%, or smallpox (30%) were not threats to the survival of the species, were they? I don’t think we can simply assert that, because we (as a species) survived the Black Death, that is proof that in all circumstances we should rely solely on our innate immune system.
Mass vaccination in children have eradicated diseases if we overlook the positive effects of better personal hygiene, sanitation, nutrition, and medical care.
And also best to overlook the correlation between the increase in asthma cases and food allergies with that mass childhood vaccination.
Likewise, the increase in food allergies and asthma may well not be due to mass childhood vaccination, but to other factors, such as over-hygiene in infancy, reduction in natural births, reduction in breastfeeding, increase in central-heating, etc.
Herd Immunity Threshold = 100 × (1 – 1/R0)/ε
Where ε is the effectiveness of vaccination …
What happens when vaccine efficacy is -ve? Put a -ve ε in that equation and you get a -ve herd immunity. Not sure what that would mean in real life, but it doesn’t sound good. I guess we need to develop a new mathematical construct for mass immune imprinting.
Also ε being zero would be an Interesting concept that might appeal to the modellers in their quest to produce scary looking graphs.
We are seeing what it means, emergent strains against which the vaccinated immune system has no defence causing higher hospitalisation and death rate.
This is one of the many methods of tyranny: reduce the human experience to a set of formulas.
It’s the wet dream of technocrats and bureaucrats.
More of the dis/misinformation thingy, hyping the magic bullet effect of vaccination.
There already was a high natural immunity to Smallpox and most victims survived to have lifelong immunity. Smallpox eradicated itself in the UK long before mass vaccination and despite previous compulsory vaccinations of the 19th Century. This was due to better hygiene and quarantining of the infectious and their contacts, plus natural immunity.
In places where Smallpox was still active what worked was a fast response to an outbreak and mass vaccination of the population round the outbreak preventing spread away from the epicentre.
Smallpox virus is slow to evolve, spreads by contact mostly, is debilitating so immobilises its host reducing opportunity to spread, has no natural reservoir outside Humans… and the vaccine is sterilising.
Herd immunity is impossible for fast evolving RNA viruses otherwise there would be no more Colds and ‘flu… and ‘flu vaccinations have been going on for decades.
So why would anyone not telling lies say that vaccination could bring herd immunity to SARS CoV 2, and keep saying that despite data showing that continued vaccination is encouraging emergence and proliferation of mutated versions which the vaccinated immune systems cannot counteract – hence infection, hospitalisation, death rates all higher than in the non-vaccinated?
And therein lies the crux of all of this. They can’t even develop an effective flu vaccine, despite it being on the market for many years, and then there’s the many years they attempted to develop a cure for the common cold, all to no avail. It’s a futile endeavour. So what made them think they could come up with an effective way of defeating this virus? It was on a par with flu at the outset but has evolved into being as benign as a cold to all but the severely immunocompromised and very elderly, for whom any respiratory virus has always posed more of a risk than the vast majority of the populace. That’s why them introducing this ‘mega-flu’ jab is just a complete joke. Anyone who can engage eyes and functioning brain can see straight through this sham. As I’ve said constantly, the Covid jab was never about protection or aiming to achieve herd immunity. It is no accident that it’s doing the opposite of helping and now it’s damaging people’s immunity instead as it shows negative efficacy, along with myriad other negative health effects. The recent G20 summit has revealed to us exactly what the intention of those toxic jabs were. Obviously we here knew the truth for some time however.
The state of the nations health is driven by profit! By injuring the nation’s immune systems, as these jabs have done, Big Pharma and our unscrupulous government officials stand to make a killing, literally!
There is no such thing as selection pressure. Mutations of viruses happens randomly. Should a mutation provide a reproductional advantage in a given environment, specimen with the mutation will eventually become dominant. This doesn’t mean that such a mutation will ever appear. There no cause-and-effect relation involve here.
It’s pointless to play around with simplistc-but-impressive-looking (to elementary school pupils, presumably) equations until one has gotten the secondary-school level biology right.
The second and third sentence of your first paragraph summarises the role of selection pressure in evolution very well.
The fourth sentence of the first paragraph is misleading — eventually every mutation that can occur will occur. Given that Covid is an RNA virus that is currently seeing very high infection levels around the world (eg, about 1:50 in the UK is infected at present) every possible mutation will occur fairly often.
Your cause and effect comment is odd; selection pressure doesn’t ’cause’ mutations, but mutations (inevitable) and selective pressure (depends) together result in (’cause’) evolutionary progression.
Selection pressure doesn’t exist because nothing puts a virus under pressure to do something and it doesn’t (and cannot) react to this supposed pressure. That’s just another case of political mislabelling. Sars-CoV2 is not an intelligent enemy trying to get us by viciously mutating itself, despite it kept being painted as such.
Your assertion about random processes is misleading: Due to all possible events having an equal probability of happening, all possible events will occur given an infinite amount of time. Only an arbitrary subset of them will occur during every finite period of time.
Your first paragraph is a common response from people that misunderstand evolution. The selection pressure is a population effect and doesn’t imply anything on the individual virus. Selective pressure really does work at population level. Indeed, you pointed this out in your earlier post.
No-one is saying that the virus ‘wants’ to evolve — it is simply a natural process that defines which random changes might become more prevalent in a population.
Re your second paragraph — I think you might be surprised at how common transcription errors are for RNA, and how quickly evolution might occur in a rapidly replicating virus.
The equations are simplistic (not impressive though, IMO). I don’t like them, as they suggest an ‘accuracy’ that doesn’t exist. They’re more a ‘approximate rule’ really. Nevertheless, they do inform somewhat of whether a given approach would be likely to result in the desired outcomes.
I’ve got no relevant scientific background but it seems to me that in this regard (population wide vaccination for a disease that is not a societal level threat) it is advisable to proceed with caution – exactly the opposite was done.
And why did they not proceed with caution?
Not interested that’s why. The “vaccines” had bugger all to do with C1984 except in as much as they facilitated mass jabbing, the purpose of which is to maim, kill and possibly chip.
Anyone here read Turtles All The Way Down?
Just asking
One problem seemingly ignored in your piece is that you seem to have assumed Covid vaccines are as effective as normal vaccines. We now know they are not and are far from it. When you talk of herd immunity, lockdowns reduced its effectiveness by preventing healthy people of little risk of serious illness contracting covid with minimal symptoms and gaining immunity that way which is what usually happens with viruses of that type. Very early on we knew who was vulnerable to covid’s worst effects and should have concentrated restrictions on them. Instead we released people who had covid from hospitals into care homes which could not have been more effective if we were trying to kill people in there off. Lockdowns caused such crippling things to normal medical treatments and caused massive financial costs that we are paying for now. It is also now becoming clear that lockdowns have or will cause more deaths than they saved. We in the UK had a policy for major viruses which if that had been followed would have resulted in a far better outcome than that persued by our government influenced by globalist institutions, such as the WHO and the continued stupidity of the Chinese government as supported by Jeremy Hunt. We had much better advice from the Great Barrington Declaration than our incompetent scientists such as Whitty, Vallance, the majority of the SAGE committee and the bonkers Imperial College modellers, who were giving advice to our hopeless government only too keen to remove the freedoms our parents fought hard for with such pathetic excuses lacking any intelligent assessment.
Such an interesting article. In the endless discussions about immunity over the last couple of years, there’s been barely a whisper about the importance of breastfeeding in priming our immune systems and protecting us from disease from a young age. Colostrum, that vital first substance necessary for early protection against disease and healthy human life is recognised by farmers as essential for livestock but routinely denied to newborns with immature immune systems. The vital role of human milk has been undermined by the baby milk industry since the 1950s using corrupt marketing methods, similar to those used by big pharma. Thousands of babies in underdeveloped countries die because of unsafe formula feeding practices. Women haven’t stood a chance, even those who wish to breastfeed are met with immense cultural and social barriers, all of which undermine the health of children and their mother’s, in favour of profit for these powerful and corrupt organisations. Deja vu?
Where R0 ……. (the doubling rate in a population with no immunity to the disease).
Not trying to be a clever clogs but I like to try and understand these formulae and I suspect a slip of the ‘pen’ here. Is it not the case that R0 can have any value, not just 2 which would be the value for a doubling rate?
It is strange that they didn’t warn of this negative impact of lockdowns at the time, or that it isn’t usually mentioned as a possible consequence of mass vaccination campaigns.
Forgive me for having to ask but this has just got to be tongue-in-cheek?
amanuensis you say:
Indeed… The selfishness of the older generation has been shocking to behold.
Particularly thinking about children being jabbed, with nary a thought about what this will mean for them in future, their naturally effective immune system being deliberately disrupted with defective Covid jabs that don’t prevent infection nor transmission – how on earth has this happened? How have ‘health practitioners’ gone along with it?!
I find blaming the older age groups for their “selfishness” to be similar to the same tactics deployed against the unvaccinated last year, which we should not be using.
The choice to all but incarcerate whole populations and all but forcibly inject them with an experimental gene therapy was made by public health experts, behavioural psychologists and politicians, with the help of a bought-and-paid for media and a rather cowardly and supine medical community.
The tactic of turning young against elderly, vaxxed against unvaxxed were the same – if the young did not follow all the rules, they would kill granny, if the unvaxxed did not get their dose of poison, it was their fault the pandemic and lockdowns would continue.
Yes, plenty of scared, foolish and selfish people followed the nudges, but the fault lies first and foremost with those who set the policy.
It was not older people asking for lockdowns and forced vaxxing, it was primarily the politicians, no doubt backed up by the likes of Gates, Bourla and others who stood much to gain from the vaxxes they already had lined up.
Blaming older people now for choices made by others reminds me so much of our health minister saying so reasonably last year that the unvaxxed were responsible for his/the government having wilfully chosen to deny us our constitutional rights, the fundamental rights to be free of discrimination and to bodily integrity, that it was our choice that he and the government had chosen to violate the law.
Yes, people should have thought things through more, spoken out more, but the fault lies with the decision makers and the nudge units. Plenty of older people protested against all of this, plenty of people below 40 were only to happy to go along with it and happily trot off to get their kids jabbed.
Ha! I’m sure the older generation will be running for cover now, while many had no qualms previously about young people being masked, and jabbed, and set up for a social credit system, to purportedly protect the elderly…
In Australia it’s the younger generations which have suffered most under jab mandates, with many people of working age coerced to have the jabs to keep their jobs – No Jab, No Job. The situation in Australia is appalling, coercive medical interventions in a supposedly ‘free’ country.
I don’t think the older generation are going to come out of this at all well, many willingly sacrificed the young.
Also see my BMJ rapid response, published on 5 August 2020
Is it ethical to vaccinate children to protect the elderly?
In Australia the government reports nearly two million children aged 5 to 15 years have been double-jabbed…with children being at little or no risk of Covid.
It’s a disgrace.