“This is a virus that we need to eliminate”—Dr. Deepti Gurdasani condemns “herd immunity” policies

[wsws.org]

{DG:And that makes it very complicated. I think there needs to be a level of honesty around this. This is not a threshold we will likely be able to reach through vaccination or contain the pandemic through vaccination alone, unless we develop a next generation of vaccines that are effective against these newer variants, which may well happen. But it’s unlikely to be able to keep up with virus evolution unless we prevent new variants from evolving.}

{DG: I think several factors are at play; There are values at play, there are ideologies at play, and there are vested interests that are clearly influencing our governments who don’t have a public interest at heart.

When we talk about the values, I think rather than the values of protecting public health and compassion, many governments have had values of short-term economic gains and have unfortunately not realized that there is no dichotomy between public health and the economy and the countries that have managed to protect the economies the most are the ones that have gotten on top of the virus and managed to contain it.

I think the second thing is ideology. I think there is a lot of libertarian ideology that has influenced governments, particularly in the West, and exceptionalism, where there has been a certain arrogance in not learning lessons from many parts of the world that we could have learned lessons from, and that were affected earlier than us in the pandemic and responded much better.

And I think there are actually disinformation groups and vested interests. And we’ve seen this, for example, the Great Barrington Declaration that came out sometime last year and had a massive influence in policy in many different parts of the world, including the UK, by our senior officials who met with proponents of the Great Barrington Declaration. For those who are unfamiliar with it, they essentially promoted an idea of focused protection of the vulnerable by some sort of shielding and letting the virus spread to the rest of the population for them to develop herd immunity through natural infection. This was obviously unscientific and completely unethical, which has been shown repeatedly now in real world experience as well.

But it’s an idea that’s permeated the consciousness and policy of many countries, including Sweden, I think the Netherlands, certainly the UK and much of the West, which has been quite disappointing to see given there were very positive examples that we could have followed quite early on. And even now it’s not too late to follow those examples.}