To be supremely nitpicky, there are cholera vaccines, these days mostly oral ones:
That, though, doesn’t meaningfully change your point. 
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In the same way we have herd immunity to the flu?!?
Letting everyone get the disease may result in the disease running it’s course (and killing millions) or it may just result in the disease becoming endemic and everyone getting it every year! Since we know of a case where a person who got it once then got it again and died four months later, I’m better heavily on the second.
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Antibodies fading in 4-6 months may or may not indicate immunity fading. And the immune system being an immensely complicated and highly individual thing, having an occasional person get it more than once doesn’t really prove much. On the other hand, we are not even a year into this, there is sooo much dry tinder still around, second infections are not going to be a significant factor (other than in vaccine development, where it is huge) for some time. As always, WDKS, but we are working on it.
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Laissez faire works for the economy (it doesn’t), so it’ll work for healthcare (it won’t)! Trickle down medicine for all! The wealthy will receive their treatment and the urine which they shall trickle upon the rest of us serfs will surely contain homeopathic traces of their treatments.
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You joke, but I will not be surprised to hear something very similar from the right. Just look at how Pence’s campaign responded to questions about spreading Covid at rallies.
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Exactly. And, “herd immunity” only works with, wait for it, “herds” of animals who stay clustered together. Humans do all sorts of crazy things like live separated from each other, stay inside, go places they should and shouldn’t etc. We don’t live in a “herd” where a disease can spread quickly, kill a bunch fo people, and confer immunity on the rest.
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Especially when Covid-19 antibodies now appear to only last six to nine months.
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This “strategy” says to protect the high risk people and let everyone else get it. Unfortunately, the “high risk” are not just people in nursing homes. It is overweight people, people with diabetes, heart disease, cigarette smokers, respiratory problems… and so on. In other words, most of the population of the US. Also a very high proportion of Trump voters. It would only work if all those people were locked away from the general population. If you lock all those people away, there won’t be a general population.
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Our study suggests that physicians’ level of confidence may be relatively insensitive to both diagnostic accuracy and case difficulty. This mismatch might prevent physicians from reexamining difficult cases where their diagnosis may be incorrect.
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See “Dunning-Kruger variant.” In medicine, humility is not just “good,” it is vital. Arrogance leads to quite literally dead people. No matter how certain you are in your diagnostic acumen, keeping the door open that you may be wrong is the difference between a good doctor and an asshole with a god complex.
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Yes. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, if you don’t have it, stay in your fucking lane.
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Some diseases exist that, unchecked, largely eradicate species. We don’t know the five year prognosis on Covid-2. Study recently came out that some immunity may only last three months. If it recurs every year, what’s the sequelae if you come down with a second bout? The fifth? If it mutates, what’s that going to mean? Yes, it effects the elderly, but what if you start young, then as you get older, it’s still around? Relying on herd immunity is a shitty experiment to do on humans with far too many unknowns.
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Am I the only one thinking that if Trump and his death-cult followers want to embrace herd immunity, they should do their parts as patriotic Americans, step up and get infected? Admittedly most of the rally-goers are already there, but the rest ought to put their money where their mouths are when it comes to “inevitable”, “necessary” sacrifice.
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That’s the thing, worrying that you could be an asymptomatic carrier and acting accordingly requires understanding of the science, compassion and empathy. Many of them don’t do those things.
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Which is a nice way of saying
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Also, I think everyone is overlooking other concerns besides death. I’m certainly worried about that, but I’m just as worried about the lingering effects they’re finding in the hearts, lungs, kidneys and even brains of Covid survivors, even those who were asymptomatic. We lost over three-thousand people in the 9/11 attacks, but 20 years later, first responders and other survivors are dying early because of exposure to the dust and debris of the attack on that day. So, they didn’t die in 2001, but they didn’t make it to 2021, whereas without the attack, they very well may have.
So even if I grant you that herd immunity might quell the virus (which I don’t), and I accept the likely death total from mass exposure (which I don’t), the virus is still going to ravage the shit out of hundreds of millions of people and who knows how that will affect them 10, 15, 20 years from now.
It’s not just dumb, it’s 5D-chess-level dumb. It’s idiocy, all the way down.
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This is a short read from JAMA that’s reasonably accessible to non-epidemiologists. The section on “Infection-Based Herd Immunity as Policy” is relevant here.
Herd Immunity and Implications for SARS-CoV-2 Control
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From JAMA in article I link to below: “[S]o far, there is no example of a large-scale successful intentional infection-based herd immunity strategy.”
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I joke only to maintain my sanity, not because I think they won’t go there. It’s a whistling past the graveyard kind of thing. When the graveyard is one George Romero wrote about.
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THIS!!! WDKS, but we do know this thing suuucks! Voluntarily surrendering a huge chunk of our population to whatever hell this bug leaves us in seems like a bad idea.
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