From the World Health Organization, right now:
‘Herd immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.
Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.
Same URL, but the archive.org version captured in November:
Herd immunity is the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection. This means that even people who haven’t been infected, or in whom an infection hasn’t triggered an immune response, they are protected because people around them who are immune can act as buffers between them and an infected person. The threshold for establishing herd immunity for COVID-19 is not yet clear.
It is tough to think of a time when science has progressed so quickly!
Also, in the Department of Evolution of Science, the W.H.O.’s January-June 2020 recommendation against masks for the general public:
Related:
- NYT curve of South Dakota COVID-19 cases, going up and then down despite no mask or shutdown order being issued (herd immunity without a vaccine or something else?)
Covid-19 is a mental disease associated with a strain of coronavirus of uncertain origin. The chief vector of Covid-19 (C19) spread is TCP/IP Internet protocols. Unlike print vectors of ideas, TCP/IP protocols can mutate rapidly, leaving little trace of their original state.
When C19 has infected a major Internet node such as Google or Facebook, it acts much as a cancerous lymph node in a human body, spreading the C19 and supressing C19 anti-ideas.
The best anti-dote to C19 (and any Internet-related mental disease like Transgenderism-18 and Racism-16) is to get off the Internet. Lockdowns and social distancing cause social isolation, which causes increased Internet consumption as a (poor) substitute for real in-the-flesh social interaction.
Also, life insurance figures probably provide the best unbiased insight into the nexus of increased mortality and associated actual economic loss.
https://www.iii.org/publications/2020-insurance-fact-book/life-annuity-financial-data/payouts
2021 report with 2020 numbers should come out in January. Complete report costs $116.
Another source of info is,
https://www.acli.com/Posting/RP20-010
which is free but new report will not come out for another year.
I wonder why the WHO didn’t just write: “And those Great Barrington Declaration people are crazy, murderous swindlers, cranks and malcontents who should be living in a rubber room.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covid-coronavirus.html
At least they’re trying to coordinate their messaging with Anthony Fauci’s Moving Goalposts of Herd Immunity and they’ve dispensed with the antiquated fallacy of herd immunity being achieved through anything other than a vaccine. That idea has to die. Everybody in the “in group” has to be on the same page as the #Science evolves, or it’s chaos!
This is a messaging strategy with a lot of feedback loops, Philip. They publish a number or issue guidance on something, do some polling, evaluate the polling data, and then change the messaging.
“You tell me what numbers to put in my equations, and I’ll give you the answer,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But you can’t tell me the numbers, because nobody knows them.”
It’s a little like a Ouija board, except this is bonafide public health and opinion methodology, conducted by experts.
“The planchette is guided by unconscious muscular exertions like those responsible for table movement. Nonetheless, in both cases, the illusion that the object (table or planchette) is moving under its own control is often extremely powerful and sufficient to convince many people that spirits are truly at work … ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouija