"Herd immunity" response plan sparks incredulous response
The United Kingdom’s approach to COVID-19 has sparked widespread backlash as scientists urged the government to introduce tougher measures to deal with the pandemic.
More than 220 scientists have signed an open letter condemning the government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, who said on Friday the spread of the infection could be managed to make the population immune.
According to Sir Patrick, about 60 per cent of the population would need to get ill to reach “herd immunity”. The idea means at-risk individuals would be protected from infection because the people around them would be resistant to the disease.
“Our aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely,” he said.
However, the scientists argued in the letter such option is not “viable” and will risk “many more lives than necessary”.
Dr William Hanage, professor of the evolution and epidemiology of infectious disease at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said he thought the policy would overwhelm the healthcare system and put high-risk population in danger.
Herd immunity only works to protect vulnerable individuals if most people in the population are vaccinated, according to Oxford Vaccine Group.
“We talk about vaccines generating herd immunity, so why is this different? Because this is not a vaccine,” Dr Hanage wrote on The Guardian.
“This is an actual pandemic that will make a very large number of people sick, and some of them will die.
“This virus is capable of shutting down countries. You should not want to be the next after Wuhan, Iran, Italy or Spain. In those places, the healthcare systems have broken down.”
University of Auckland associate professor Helen Petousis-Harris said a herd immunity strategy means “throwing people under the train”.
“When you have that proportion of the community affected, you can probably calculate how many people will be dead,” she told Stuff.co.nz. “When you have that overwhelming explosion of cases, your health system is overwhelmed and your mortality rate goes up.”
Following the criticism, the country’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday advised people to avoid non-essential travel and contact with others. He also asked households where someone was displaying symptoms to self-isolate for 14 days.
At the time of writing, the UK has not introduced mandatory self-isolation measures for international arrivals.