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For what viruses have we reached meaningful herd immunity without vaccines?
by roelschroeven 6y ago
For what viruses have we reached meaningful herd immunity without vaccines?
- standardUser 6y agoZika is one.
- maxerickson 6y agoFlu, if you grant that different strains count.
- acdha 6y agoInfluenza? The one which kills thousands of people every year despite widespread vaccination?
- maxerickson 6y agoWhy would you respond like this without accounting for the rest of my very short comment?
- acdha 6y agoBecause it shows that herd immunity is not a given. Influenza is not only not there but will never be due to the nature of the virus being unusually prone to mutating.
- maxerickson 6y agoThat doesn't address what I said. There is an argument to be made that various strains are different viruses, and that we have herd immunity to some of them. It wouldn't make sense to invent an English name for each one, but that doesn't mean they should be treated as a single thing in all contexts. And I even stated it as ambiguous depending on how you count strains, I'm not arguing that there is only one way to look at it!
- reissbaker 6y agoYour comment seems to rest upon a claim that we do not have flu vaccines. In fact, we do, and about half of all US adults are vaccinated against the flu every year — and more than half of US children are vaccinated, since the flu is more dangerous to children than adults. Do you have a specific strain of flu in mind when you claim that we have reached herd immunity "to various strains" without vaccination?
- maxerickson 6y agoHow about the 1918 influenza pandemic? There's also lots of places that don't do much flu vaccination, they don't necessarily have the same strains in circulation forever.
- reissbaker 6y agoThere's a lot we don't know about the 1918 influenza pandemic, since it was at the dawn of much of modern medical science. However, Wikipedia claims that "a 2007 analysis of medical journals from the period of the pandemic found that the viral infection was no more aggressive than previous influenza strains. Instead, malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals, and poor hygiene, all exacerbated by the recent war, promoted bacterial superinfection. This superinfection killed most of the victims, typically after a somewhat prolonged death bed." [1] Herd "immunity" was never reached, at least not in the sense that members of the herd with weaker immune systems were protected due to the virus's inability to circulate thanks to widespread, strong immunity. According to this commonly-cited paper [2], nearly all modern cases of "Influenza A" (a specific type of flu) in humans have been from descendants and variants of the original 1918 virus. The variants temporarily disappeared from active circulation in the 1950s when they were initially outcompeted by the then-novel H2N2, but were accidentally leaked from a lab in the 1970s and have circulated in humans ever since. We are still plagued by variants of the 1918 flu today. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu 2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/
- sparrish 6y agoExcept for 2020 where it's not even going to reach 100. https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html
- acdha 6y agoExactly: that’s not because we suddenly hit herd immunity globally but because isolation masks are effective ways to stop respiratory illnesses.