This is another political hit piece published by the prestigious Nature Journal. How the elite or so called experts try to fool the citizens with exaggerated alarmism and demagoguery! Ideological bias dressed up as science! Such a thoroughly disingenuous and dishonest article! Really despicable!
Or if you follow the money trail: Clearly some scientists are corrupt when it comes to seeking career advancement and obtaining more funding for their research!
Please take note that this lengthy article about such an important subject quotes very few scientists!
"... Such reports from Manaus, together with comparable arguments about parts of Italy that were hit hard early in the pandemic, helped to embolden proposals to chase herd immunity. The plans suggested letting most of society return to normal, while taking some steps to protect those who are most at risk of severe disease. That would essentially allow the coronavirus to run its course, proponents said."
False! Of course, governments ought to recommend wearing face masks, staying away from crowds or events, to be sanitary and to keep social distancing.
"“Surrendering to the virus” is not a defensible plan, says Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Such an approach would lead to a catastrophic loss of human lives without necessarily speeding up society’s return to normal, he says. “We have never successfully been able to do it before, and it will lead to unacceptable and unnecessary untold human death and suffering.”"
What a nonsense! By the way, this article quotes very few experts, but Mr. Anderson working out of far leftist California was quoted at least 7 times in this article! Makes you wonder! I think Mr. Anderson is willfully confusing the medieval Black Death with the rather harmless Covid-19 pandemic!
"US President Donald Trump spoke positively about it in September, using the malapropism “herd mentality”. "
Elitists with Trump Derangement Syndrome! Did he really say that? Did he correct it? How often did he use the incorrect term?
"In early October, a libertarian think tank and a small group of scientists released a document called the Great Barrington Declaration. In it, they call for a return to normal life for people at lower risk of severe COVID-19, to allow SARS-CoV-2 to spread to a sufficient level to give herd immunity. People at high risk, such as elderly people, it says, could be protected through measures that are largely unspecified. "
Propaganda and Orwellian Double Speak, trying to imply e.g. no consensus! The Great Barrington Declaration, that is being mocked here, has about three main signers and 45 co-signers from the medical profession and academia. For their courage to defy the propaganda and disinformation about Covid-19, these signers should be celebrated as heroes! Over 11,000 "medical & public health scientists" and about 31,000 have signed this declaration as of 10/25/2020. This is a declaration not a prescription!
"hat’s because the phenomenon doesn’t actually confer immunity to the virus itself — it only reduces the risk that vulnerable people will come into contact with the pathogen."
Utter nonsense like medieval superstition!
"Calculations of the threshold [of the reproduction number to assess herd immunity] are very sensitive to the values of R, ... estimated the Rt in more than 30 countries, using data on the daily number of new COVID-19 cases from March. They then used these values to calculate a threshold for herd immunity in each country’s population. The numbers ranged from as high as 85% in Bahrain, with its then-Rt of 6.64, to as low as 5.66% in Kuwait, where the Rt was 1.06. ... Estimates of the threshold for SARS-CoV-2 range from 10% to 70% or even more"
Clearly, the numbers of this so called metric are all over the place rendering it quite useless as common sense would suggest! What is the point?
"Even once herd immunity is attained across a population, it’s still possible to have large outbreaks, such as in areas where vaccination rates are low. ... “In local pockets, you start to see a drop in vaccinations, and then you can have local outbreaks which can be very large ...” ... But if it turns out that anybody could become a superspreader, then “those assumptions that people are relying on to get the estimates down to around 20% or 30% are just not accurate”,"
Oh well, the world is not perfect and such outbreaks can be contained etc.! Let's call this alarmism and fear mongering as well! Ah, the superspreader! Let's call that medieval superstition or the bogeyman argument instead of science!
"Will herd immunity work? Many researchers say pursuing herd immunity is a bad idea. “Attempting to reach herd immunity via targeted infections is simply ludicrous,” Andersen says. “In the US, probably one to two million people would die.” ... Despite this, Sweden is hardly a model of success — statistics from Johns Hopkins University show the country has seen more than ten times the number of COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people seen in neighbouring Norway (58.12 per 100,000, compared with 5.23 per 100,000 in Norway)."
At the bottom of the article you find what the authors of this article may believe to be crescendo the final coup de grace to the herd immunity argument. Note, for it they use Mr. Anderson again as the authority on this subject! Who is Nature Journal trying to fool here with these shock and awe numbers? Comparing Sweden with only one other country! How accurate are these country level death toll statistics anyway. 58.12 per 100,000 translates into less than 0.0006% of population, a fatality rate probably comparable to an average flu epidemic.
"The concept of achieving herd immunity through community spread of a pathogen rests on the unproven assumption that people who survive an infection will become immune. For SARS-CoV-2, some kind of functional immunity seems to follow infection, but “to understand the duration and effects of the immune response we have to follow people longitudinally, and it’s still early days” ... Nor is there yet a foolproof way to measure immunity to the virus, ... Researchers can test whether people have antibodies that are specific to SARS-CoV-2, but they still don’t know how long any immunity might last. ... Seasonal coronaviruses that cause common colds provoke a waning immunity that seems to last approximately a year ... In recent months, there have been reports of people being reinfected with SARS-CoV-2 after an initial infection, but how frequently these reinfections happen and whether they result in less serious illnesses remain open questions, says Andersen ... “If the people who are infected become susceptible again in a year, then basically you’ll never reach herd immunity” through natural transmission ... Vaccination is the only ethical path to herd immunity, he [Anderson] says."
This is so ridiculous and laughable! At least we learn that common colds cause an immunity of about one year and caused by a similar virus. Mr. Anderson here again engaging in wild speculations! Nowhere does this article mention that the human body is a marvelous, extraordinary product of millions of years of evolution that has survived many diseases in the past by adopting and fighting those diseases effectively! Most conveniently Natur Journal curiously omits to mention that there is at least one famous case in medical history where humans gain lifelong immunity against a pathogen: Chickenpox.
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