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Writer's pictureMichelle Leduc Catlin

What is Herd Immunity?


A short lesson, and some context...


I wanted a resource that vetted the mass of available information and misinformation with a mind to science and reason, rather than politics and fear.


I wanted to understand and communicate to other non-scientists the information that we’re not getting from the mainstream media.


I wanted to move through the anger and find the commonality.


And so, I created this blog.


What I know is that we all want health, freedom, and accurate information.


Well, to be brutally honest, most of us want confirmation of our opinions.


But that’s just our surface identity.


Our ego.


Underneath it all, I believe we do want the same foundational things.


And, we have different ideas of how to go about finding, having, and creating these things.


That’s okay.


What we must never lose sight of is what really matters.


The truth.


Not the truth as we see it, but technical truth.


When we all know what we mean by something, we can discuss steps to attaining what we all want.


And so I want to clarify some basic “talking points” that we hear bandied about.


Today, we get a short lesson from Oxford University Professor Sunetra Gupta.


You may remember her from such smash hits as The Great Barrington Declaration (which you can sign HERE.)


You may have listened to her cool, calm, British tones in the Concerned Ontario Doctors Covid-19 Summit interview I posted last week.


But you may have no familiarity with the epidemiological star, and that’s okay, too.

In this short video, Professor Gupta explains how herd immunity works…


Some highlights…


“When a virus arrives in a population, it starts to spread very quickly because people are not immune. So everyone is available for infection. But as it spreads, it starts to limit its own possibilities because people start becoming immune, putting up a barrier to its spread.”


“There are four other coronaviruses that we currently live with, that are all circulating in the human population. And the reason you don’t hear about them is because there is herd immunity to each one of them, which keeps the risks of being infected very low.”


“Every year, a number of elderly people do die of these other coronaviruses, but the risk of coronavirus infection among the elderly is kept low by herd immunity.”


Want the full explanation, with easy-to-understand diagrams?



Class dismissed.


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