The first claim Dr Gupta addresses is clearly a strawman. Hancock is clearly talking about herd immunity in the context of getting herd immunity through the sp

The first claim Dr Gupta addresses is clearly a strawman. Hancock is clearly talking about herd immunity in the context of getting herd immunity through the spread of the virus itself, and not in the context of a vaccine. It's also an extremely disingenuous argument. The author goes from talking about a society acquiring HERD immunity through infection, but does not actually find any evidence in the diseases mentioned of this happening, and instead says "In a nutshell, the development of immunity through natural infection is a common feature of many pathogens", switching suddenly to talking about personal immunity through natural infection. She then posts a bunch of points about how we actually dont know whether we can achieve herd immunity naturally or not, or how far we are from it (which basically affirms Hancock's original point), but says that there is some evidence in the fact that the case rate curve has bent in many places. However, many (if not all) places mentioned imposed some sort of intervention. Every one of them has promoted social distancing and mask wearing in addition. Further, her link points to Europe, where many countries are now seeing a massive resurgence of the virus, which seems to indicate that the drop had less to do with herd immunity (unless it's extremely short lived, which also makes the herd immunity solution non viable) and people relaxing social distancing rules and other measures as they get more lax, and/or need to congregate indoors more as it gets colder. The Barrington proposal also defines harm as death. However, there is a lot of non death related issues that people who have survived the virus continue to suffer from. We also don't have any idea what the long term impact may be, and there are good reasons to believe that it may have significant long term impacts on many people in the group that is less likely to die. Further, we are also fairly certain that the disease is airborne. So how do we ensure segregation of the vulnerable groups from the "non vulnerable" group when theoretically a member of the vulnerable group could be affected by simply breathing the air in a room 5 minutes after someone who was infected was hanging out in it. Finally, there is a lot of good evidence that the herd immunity process will devastate the economy because people will voluntarily reduce their activity when the virus is spreading, so it won't even help with the problem it purports to solve. The article does not present a good argument at all, and engages in sleight of hand more than presenting an actual argument (for example, they point out that the immunity is likely to be short term, but seems to think that just pointing that out is enough to now dismiss it, even though it completely undermines the whole herd immunity argument).