Quotes About Herd immunity

Keeping lice out of schools should be a herd immunity type of attitude. Schools should send home brochures with a plastic comb attached in an envelope.

If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity. This is the principle of herd immunity, and it is through herd immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination.

Those people who get the flu shot not only protect themselves from getting the flu or reducing their likelihood of developing the flu, but those around them.

There's a cultural expectation that everyone will be immunized, in part to protect the entire population. When people refuse that expectation, they're indulging in a certain kind of political or social immunity.

This is why the chances of contracting measles can be higher for a vaccinated person living in a largely unvaccinated community than they are for an unvaccinated person living in a largely vaccinated community.

All sorts of risk-benefit analyses and models of herd immunity tend to produce the conclusion that vaccination benefits the individual as well as the public. When Harvard researchers recently used game theory to build a mathematical model of vaccination behavior during an influenza epidemic, they found that even "a population of self-interested people can defeat an epidemic." No altruism is required.

It was our ability to refocus India from herd immunity to attacking the virus that allowed smallpox eradication to succeed.")

There was no vaccine in sight; and the number of infections required to achieve herd immunity could be calculated, as it was a simple function of the reproductive rate. (The formula was 1 ? 1/R0, where R0 was the reproduction number.)

If you don't vaccinate your child, it's not only your child that is at risk. It's also other children, including other children who, for medical reasons, can't be vaccinated.

Herd immunity is, it turns out, not incredibly easy to understand. It took me quite a bit of reading before I fully grasped it. But understanding herd immunity is essential to understanding why we vaccinate the way we do.

If we vaccinate well, if we increase those vaccination rates, we can stop measles just as we stopped it before.

With infectious disease, without vaccines, there's no safety in numbers.

When most members of a community are vaccinated, they protect those who are not by eliminating the viral reservoirs in the population. The effect is known as 'herd immunity.'

For a few years after we either reach herd immunity or have a widely distributed vaccine, people will still be recovering from the overall clinical, psychological, social, and economic shock of the pandemic and the adjustments it required, perhaps through 2024. I'll call this the intermediate pandemic period. Then, gradually, things will return to "normal"—albeit in a world with some persistent changes. Around 2024, the post-pandemic period will likely begin.