APPENDIX 7

Herd immunity

 

On 13th March, the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, said: “Our aim is to try and [sic] reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely; also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease.” This prompted 229 scientists to sign an open letter stating that going for herd immunity was not a viable option.

On 4th April it was reported that a member of SAGE, Professor Graham Medley, professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and director of the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, was pushing the concept of “herd immunity”, suggesting the country needed to prioritise the young over the old.

His remarks prompted one person in the vulnerable category to suggest his ideas sounded like “social Darwinism” and “survival of the fittest”, while pointing out that China, where COVID-19 originated, and with fewer deaths than the UK, had not resorted to such tactics.

The government stepped back from the herd immunity concept, previously mentioned by Sir Patrick Vallance, after data from Imperial College London suggested such an approach would result in 250,000 deaths.

Professor Medley, described as the Government’s chief pandemic modeller, speaking to The Times, called for a rethink, claiming the UK had “painted itself into a corner” with its response. He said: “This disease is so nasty that we had to suppress it completely. Then we’ve kind of painted ourselves into a corner, because then the question will be what do we do now?

“We will have done three weeks of this lockdown so there’s a big decision coming up on 13th April. In broad terms, are we going to continue to harm children to protect vulnerable people, or not?”

In a phrase which echoed US President Donald Trump's suggestion that “we can’t have the cure be worse than the problem”, Prof. Medley claimed a prolonged lockdown would cause more harm than the virus itself.

“The measures to control the disease cause harm,” he said. “The principal one is economic, and I don’t mean to the economy generally, I mean to the incomes of people who rely on a continuous stream of money and their children, particularly the school closure aspect.

“If we carry on with lockdown it buys us more time, we can get more thought put into it, but it doesn’t resolve anything – it’s a placeholder.”

Commenting on Prof. Medley’s remarks, one man in his 80s told the Daily Express: “China and South Korea relied on a lockdown, and sensible testing, and with more than a billion people have only lost 3,000, and now their lockdown can be lifted. The professor is calling for surrender. I’m for holding out and for sensible policies that can beat the virus.”

 

Lecture on herd immunity

On 19th August, the former Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said that the government “lectured” him about herd immunity during cross-party coronavirus talks, a policy he described as “eugenic”.

He said he had been invited to a meeting with Cabinet Office officials in the spring with the shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, where a talk was held on the topic.

The government has repeatedly denied that pursuing herd immunity in tackling the coronavirus was ever its aim. The government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said in March that it was necessary to broaden the peak of the illness but not suppress it completely, and to achieve herd immunity about 60% of the population would need to get the illness.

He later said it had never been the government’s actual plan. Speaking to the Commons’ health committee in May, he said: “I should be clear about what I was trying to say, and if I didn’t say this clearly enough then I apologise.

“What I was trying to say was that, in the absence of a therapeutic, the way in which you can stop a community becoming susceptible to this is through immunity, and immunity can be obtained by vaccination, or it can be obtained by people who have the infection.”

Also in March, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said herd immunity was not the government’s goal, stating: “Our goal is to protect life. I want to be absolutely crystal clear that we will do what is necessary to protect life.”

A government spokesperson, on the day of Mr Corbyn’s comments, said it was categorically wrong to suggest herd immunity was the government’s aim: “Our goal is to reduce the impact of coronavirus – protecting the most vulnerable and ensuring our NHS and social care system has capacity to cope while leading the world on scientific research into therapeutics and a vaccine.”

In other comments, Mr Corbyn said Britain’s response had been poorer than countries such as South Korea, with money wasted on the emergency Nightingale hospitals programme that he claimed had “largely gone into the private sector”.

He said: “The idea that an epidemic or pandemic could cause a real problem in Britain was actually mooted in 2008 and even then they identified Britain’s lack of preparedness for dealing with it. We get to this year, lack of PPE, 94% bed occupancy in hospitals, insufficiency of space in care homes, and the whole thing got worse and worse and eventually the government got around to saying there would have to be restrictions on movements.”

 

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