In March 2020, he was incredulous on hearing Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific advisor, casually mention that Britain was pursuing a strategy to attain herd immunity through natural infection. It caused a public outcry.” An infectious diseases physician, Farrar served in the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage). Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust (now simply Wellcome), remembered that at the start of the year “herd immunity stampeded on to the scene. The debate over herd immunity against COVID-19 was especially fierce during 2020 in Britain, where the concept had originated. In view of the many uses and abuses of herd immunity in recent years, there is clearly much at stake in getting this history right. It made the herd a supple and powerful metaphor for the social dynamics and connectedness of human populations, a functional means to describe altruism and self-sacrifice. 5 Trotter’s investigation of human gregariousness, altruism, corporate morale, and suggestibility exerted profound influence in the 1920s on psychoanalysis, sociology, and British epidemiology-even if the work is largely forgotten now. 4 Of course, it would be silly to deny that alluding to a herd signifies some connection with animal husbandry.īut I want to explore the more proximate link to popularity of the herd-not just as a convenient veterinary analogy-in nascent social psychology, particularly in the study by surgeon and social theorist Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916). What did it mean in the 1920s to imagine the immunity of a human herd? What lessons for contemporary public health can be gleaned from these earlier conceptual frameworks? Recent historical accounts have gestured toward veterinary similes of herd immunity, emphasizing the power of animal symbolism 3 or multispecies crossovers and ecological mindsets. My intention here is to reveal more clearly a little of the changing conceptual landscape of collective immunity, thereby contributing to making our understanding of epidemic sociality and solidarity more robust and usable. Epidemiologists and politicians frequently disavowed any hankering for natural herd immunity various activists demanded to be “unherded.” There was a misapprehension that a herd could only refer to collectives of nonhuman animals, and that it must, therefore, be demeaning. Unaware of actual historical usage of the term, many experts felt uncomfortable with the simple veterinary analogies they presumed it implied. Instead, most governments articulated a commitment to suppression or even elimination of the virus until artificial herd immunity, through immunization, could be achieved. Once it was clear that such a policy would lead to excessive deaths and collapse of health care systems, herd immunity often became a term of reproach, signifying state indifference to the survival of its citizens. Before much was known about the virus’s infectivity and virulence, some public health leaders and politicians hoped that mitigated transmission might quickly result in natural herd immunity, when enough of the population had been infected and recovered. But herd immunity then signaled social gregariousness and altruism, generative mutualism, and a spectrum of collective protections-not a simple threshold of past infection and vaccination as it so often does now.Īt the beginning of 2020, with the global spread of the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), herd immunity became a common, if often ambiguous, simplistic, and controversial, locution. Dudley’s epidemiological studies, that herd immunity gained currency as a conceptual tool tracing the human population’s shifting immunological terrain. 2 It was not until the 1920s, particularly through Sheldon F. Wilson coined the term “herd immunity” in 1923, public health officers struggled to describe and to frame how human collectives might eventually become invulnerable to epidemic disease. 1 Accordingly, immunity immediately after World War I still referred to a person’s reaction to infection, the singular response of the body’s defense mechanisms to contact with the foreign and unfamiliar. The notion of specific personal immunity had caught on only 30 or so years earlier, displacing older and looser impressions of an individual’s constitutional resistance or susceptibility to disease. One hundred years ago, there was no formal concept of human “herd immunity.” When influenza swept across the world in 1918–1919, the rise and fall of the pandemic were not explained in relation to the absence or presence of herd or population immunity.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |