There is no protective vaccine against the coronavirus yet. They are working hard on this, in various places around the world, by government institutions as well as the (often disgusted but now cherished) pharmaceutical industry, but it would be a miracle if there was a vaccine by the end of the year or early 2021 .
The unpleasant truth is that we can’t do much against the virus until then. It is a completely new virus. One of the countless ones that have moved from animals to humans – something that has happened for thousands, hundreds of thousands of years – and surprise humanity every time. No one in the world is resistant to the virus and the best way we can deal with it is to get sick in a controlled way. Not all at the same time, because then healthcare cannot handle it but in a dosed manner.
A little sick is healthy. That is the essence of a vaccination. Your body is exposed to a minuscule dose of the pathogen – “alive,” crippled, or parts of it (proteins). As a result, human defenses adapt to the new pathogen. It learns to recognize the intruder and to prepare factories for defense. This vaccination process is accompanied by mild, barely noticeable symptoms, it takes about a week and then the body can react quickly the next time when the pathogen in question really attacks, in large quantities and in full regimen.
The same strategy has also been adopted for the approach that the Netherlands is now adopting – not locking the entire country but allowing the virus to be controlled – the slightly ill is healthy. Locking the country, a region or a village sounds very cool (“we also want a lockdown”), but that does not work well for every pathogen. It works at Ebola, as we have seen in several African countries in recent years. If you completely shut off a region with Ebola from the world for a few months, the disease will be subdued afterwards. But Ebola victims are extremely visible. Blood comes out of all their openings, they feel miserable and they don’t feel like getting up and getting on a bus or plane. You can put a fence on such a disease.
This is much less successful with flu, colds and related diseases such as corona. Infection control is not a one size fits all. The people who carry the coronavirus are not nearly as visible as with Ebola, and they often do not know that they spread the virus. Furthermore, the means of transport that the virus uses – leftovers from snot, mucus on hands and doorknobs and cough drops in the air – are invisible. As soon as the lockdown is released, the gate opens again, the pandemic continues where it left off.
And so the solution is “herd immunity”: getting sick on a dose basis. We know from the course of the epidemic as we have it in the Netherlands (in each country the course of the disease seems a bit different) that eighty percent of people who become infected with the coronavirus do not suffer as much from it: a little sore throat, some coughing and a slight cold. These are the healthy adults and once they have been sick they can no longer infect the weak and old fellow man. That is the essence of herd immunity.
By way of interlude, herd immunity is also the process that benefits people who don’t want their children vaccinated against measles or other childhood diseases. You know, because they have heard from the neighbor or read on a “reliable” website that there is poison in such a vaccine and your child can become autistic. It is nonsense but it will not hurt if the rest of the population (the “herd”) is immune and does not spread the pathogen in question. With measles and other childhood diseases, you get such a herd immunity if 90 to 95 percent of the population is vaccinated. Therefore, herd immunity is also referred to as the free rider effect. Those who do not have their children vaccinated benefit from a collective facility without contributing to its maintenance.
At corona, we would like vulnerable people – people over eighty, people with underlying diseases or with a reduced immune system – to benefit from the collective. They can take shelter in the herd. It seems that the 90 to 95 percent required to protect measles unvaccinated individuals is not necessary at corona and perhaps 60 percent may be sufficient.
Vulnerable people can survive a corona pandemic if they are not bombarded with too much virus. Their defense system will not be eliminated. So when everyone is coughing and sneezing, as now, in the initial stages of a pandemic, vulnerable people should be shielded as much as possible. But if after a few weeks or months, most healthy people have mastered the disease, there is herd immunity and much less virus circulating in society.
Choosing herd immunity will undoubtedly result in some young and healthy adults ending up in intensive care, but unfortunately there is not much to choose from. And so the healthy people now have to get sick in order to protect their fellow human beings.
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Clear, good story.
