I am truly baffled why the epidemiology community ever thought herd immunity will work. There is ample evidence that it is not a panacea. e.g. influenzae, hepatitis, meningitis, measles, mumps, rubella, yellow fever.
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Most of the diseases you list are examples of herd immunity working in developed world communities. People without immunity to them are pretty safe from them.
Herd immunity isn't eradication, it's just a reduction of the likelihood of infection among people who aren't immune themselves.
All of those got to herd immunity by vaccination, not by actually contracting the disease.
It wasn't clear to me that you meant "flatten the curve and ride this out to herd immunity", since this article was about herd immunity via vaccination.
Did the epidemiology community ever think that? I remember as early as March of last year, epidemiologists saying that herd immunity was not the way forward, and that this would likely become endemic. It seemed to mostly be reporters and politicians who pushed the herd immunity angle.
For a while early on allowing the virus to spread through the population, with limited distancing and lockdown measures to control the rate of spread, in order to achieve herd immunity was official British government policy.
I'm not knocking them to be honest. In the early months so little was known for sure that it was a matter of making best estimates, and as better data came in they quickly adapted their strategy.
From the article:
> and many scientists had thought that once people started being immunized en masse, herd immunity would permit society to return to normal.
> many scientists
It's really difficult to tell from the sidelines the difference between Cassandras and the Trelawneys. Is there a concrete way to get the pulse of the epidemiologists over time?
I can believe that. I have not dug much into the historical herd immunity statements, so it is possible they were not, although purported to be, by experts.
It was also a fair amount of HNers pushing the herd immunity thing as well.
I don't want to necessarily attribute it to "epidemiologists" but there has been a pretty clear line from policymakers since about three weeks into the lockdowns (which was as long as we were initially told they would need to last to "flatten the curve") that we needed to stay locked down, keep wearing masks and distancing etc. until vaccines could be given to enough people to effectively end Covid transmission. There's a whole movement of prominent policy & medical leading lights that you can find with the #ZeroCovid hashtag on Twitter pushing this line.
Because COVID doesn’t spread very easily. Mumps has a basic reproduction factor of 10-12, Covid is closer to 3-5. Cut Mumps transmission by 80% and nothing happens, cut COVID by 80% and it goes away fairly quickly.
Other coronavirus are endemic in China, but they rarely spread outside the country.
I think there was a glimpse of hope for a global effort to not add a new virus to that list, because it's not like we don't have enough of them.
But I always thought that window closed in April 2020 last year when the stance of the majority was to live with the virus, the whole "new normal" campaign. Some thought the virus was slow enough to mutate to still handle it, but they forgot that with millions of people being virus factories it would be a matter of time.
In this context I think herd immunity counts vaccine driven immunity. That is how we successfully control diseases such as measles, mumps, and rubella.
I'm not baffled since there's a good chance we'll reach effective immunity as with all of those mentioned except flu.
Herd immunity doesn't mean eradication. It means keeping outbreaks small.
They possibly thought based on previous outbreaks in Asian countries that people would see the severity of the problem and that it could be contained enough (and with that likelihood of mutations lowered) until vaccination efforts have reached their threshold. The probably didn't expect that multiple big countries would just let people go about their daily lives normally for a long time and spread the virus in that proportion.
Well, the pox, diphteria and polio are gone or almost gone due to vaccinations, at one point or the other we had herd immunity with those. Its just that some small pockets of society refused to vaccinate and played incubators, so the rest of us wouldn't miss all the "fun"...
Quite the same for all the other diseases you enumerated, just that we never managed to get herd immunity due to antivaxxers ruining it.
Or even worse than antivaxxers, the actual vaccinations being given in a mass rollout:
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/08/25/9058847...
"It's actually an interesting conundrum. The very tool you are using for [polio] eradication is causing the problem"
Yes, the oral polio vaccine is a live vaccine that can cause polio. More advanced vaccines, practically everything in use in developed countries nowadays, don't contain live virus. It's just that third-world countries cannot afford better vaccines.
So yes, you are right that there are some corner cases.
This article isn't about natural herd immunity from everybody getting the disease, with most recovering and becoming immune. The article is worrying that even with vaccination, we may not be able to reach herd immunity. Too many variants; too slow deployment; too many vaccinated people still transmitting the disease.