The WHO on Monday warned against the idea that herd immunity might be a realistic strategy to stop the COVID-19 pandemic, dismissing such proposals as “simply unethical.”
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a media briefing that health officials typically aim to achieve herd immunity by vaccination.
To obtain herd immunity from a highly infectious disease such as measles, for example, about 95 percent of the population must be immunized, he said.
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“Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it,” he said.
Some researchers have argued that allowing COVID-19 to spread in populations that are not obviously vulnerable would help build up herd immunity and is a more realistic way to stop the pandemic, instead of the lockdowns that have proved economically devastating.
“Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak,” Tedros said, adding that too little was known about immunity to COVID-19 to know if herd immunity is even achievable.
“We have some clues, but we don’t have the complete picture,” he said, adding that the WHO had documented instances of people becoming reinfected with COVID-19 after recovering from an initial bout of the virus.
“Allowing a dangerous virus that we don’t fully understand to run free is simply unethical,” he said.
The WHO estimates that less than 10 percent of the population has any immunity to COVID-19, meaning the vast majority of the world remains susceptible.
Tedros added that countries had reported record-high daily figures of COVID-19 to the health agency for the past four days, citing surges in Europe and the Americas in particular.
In related news, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) on Monday said that it had temporarily halted its COVID-19 vaccine trial because one of its participants had become sick.
“We have temporarily paused further dosing in all our COVID-19 vaccine candidate clinical trials, including the Phase 3 ENSEMBLE trial, due to an unexplained illness in a study participant,” the company said in a statement.
The pause means the enrollment system has been closed for the 60,000-patient clinical trial while the independent patient safety committee is convened.
J&J said that serious adverse events (SAEs), such as accidents or illnesses, are “an expected part of any clinical study, especially large studies.”
Guidelines allow the company to pause a study to determine if an SAE was related to the drug in question and whether to resume the study.
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