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WHO warns that pursuing herd immunity against Covid-19 is unethical and may not even be possible
- WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus rejected a herd immunity strategy
- He said herd immunity is achieved ‘by protecting people, not exposing them’
- Tedros warned that some diseases need 95% immunity to stop the spread
The WHO director warned against using herd immunity as a strategy to stop the pandemic, describing the idea as “simply unethical.”
The idea that letting the virus circulate will eventually pay off has been touted by those who oppose the closures, but Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said “herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not exposing them to it.
“Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy to respond to an outbreak,” Tedros said.
He added that some diseases such as measles need up to 95 percent of people to be protected for herd immunity to develop, while the WHO estimates that less than 10 percent of the world’s population has immunity to Covid-19.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (pictured), the head of the WHO, warned against seeking herd immunity as a strategy to stop the pandemic.
Herd immunity is achieved when so many people are immune that the virus does not spread through the population, protecting even those who are still susceptible.
The idea caused controversy in Britain in the spring when the UK government initially took lighter measures than much of Europe, hinting at a strategy of herd immunity, before finally changing course and going into lockdown.
Sweden, which rejected the lockdown, also suggested that it could develop herd immunity and said this is not its main goal.
However, a study conducted in May, amid the first wave of the pandemic, found that only 7.3 percent of people in Stockholm, the worst hit, had developed antibodies.
Tedros said that too little was known about immunity to Covid-19 to know if herd immunity is achievable.
He added that governments generally achieve herd immunity with vaccines, which are still in development for the coronavirus.
“We have some clues, but we don’t have the whole picture,” he said of Covid-19 immunity.
Tedros noted that the WHO has documented some cases of people being re-infected with coronavirus after recovering from an initial attack of the virus.
On Monday, doctors reported that a man in Nevada had tested positive for coronavirus for the second time in June after previously testing it in April.
The second infection was “symptomatically more severe than the first,” they wrote in The Lancet medical journal.
However, cases like this have been rare compared to the total of more than 37.4 million infections worldwide.
Sweden, with a mild pandemic response led by lead epidemiologist Anders Tegnell (right), has made slow progress toward herd immunity.
Tedros said that while most people seem to develop some kind of immune response, it’s unclear how long that protection lasts or how strong that protection is.
“Allowing a dangerous virus that we do not fully understand to be released is simply unethical,” he said.
The WHO estimates that less than 10 percent of the population has immunity to the coronavirus, which means that the vast majority of the world remains susceptible.
Tedros also noted that countries had reported record daily Covid-19 numbers to the UN health agency for the past four days.
A resurgence of virus cases in Europe has led to alarming numbers in Britain, Germany and Italy in recent days, with Spain and France already in a second wave.
A group of researchers who examined the European figures said in June that “no country has seen infection rates sufficient to prevent a second wave of transmission.”
“The herd immunity argument, therefore, is at odds with both the mortality data” and the numbers on the spread of the disease, they said.
