On ‘herd immunity,’ vaccines, and pandemic whiplash

In mid-March, as the British government dragged its feet on implementing strict coronavirus lockdown measures that it would soon impose anyway, Patrick Vallance, the country’s chief scientific adviser, gave a series of interviews and discussed a concept with which many people were not then familiar: “herd immunity,” or the threshold at which enough members of a given population are immune to an infectious disease that the disease’s spread is controlled. Vallance—and, later, other officials—seemed to suggest that the government’s goal was to allow the virus to circulate while shielding only the most vulnerable against it. As The Atlantic’s Ed Yong put it at the time, the message appeared to be: “Keep calm and carry on… and get COVID-19.” That notion met with a swift, fierce backlash, including among sections of the press—it was inhumane, critics charged, as well as being scientifically illiterate. Vallance and his colleagues quickly backtracked, insisting that letting the virus spread in the name of herd immunity wasn’t their plan, but merely a scientific concept; Matt Hancock, Britain’s health minister, insisted as much in an (initially paywalled) article for a right-wing newspaper. More charitable observers criticized the episode as merely a messaging disaster. (As one expert told Yong, “It’s been a case of how not to communicate during an outbreak.”) Others claimed that herd immunity actually was, at one point, Britain’s plan: In late March, the Sunday Times reported... Continue reading at 'Columbia Journalism Review'

[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2020-10-21 12:30:20 UTC ]
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Pandemic pen pals: How Colombian libraries lift spirits

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