Proposing people's collective immunity to COVID-19 is not ethical, says the World Health Organization
- Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, has been forced to issue a concrete warning on the issue of group immunity that has become so contentious in the effort against COVID-19 during these weeks: "It is not acceptable either from a scientific or ethical point of view." The debate has warmed up after a group of scientists have called for the need to promote a strategy for achieving collective immunity after discarding confinements.
"Thousands of doctors around the world say that confinement damages the mental and physical health of the population," and with similar headlines people have been approached by the last great controversy of COVID-19. Thousands of professionals in science, medicine and other areas of health have thus criticized the strategy of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the majority of the governments of the planet in the plant. Regardless of the exact number of signatories and their nature (the low quality of the signatures collected on the Internet – anonymous, fake names… – reflected in some media, the American Institute for Economic Research think tank of the right, a member of a network of organisations that deny climate change… it is true that the proponents of the document have given new impetus to the concept of "collective immunity".
The Barrington Charter of 4 October, signed by Sunetra Gupta (University of Oxford), Jay Bhattachary (University of Stanford) and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University), proposes the suspension of confinements and other restrictions on activities, with each citizen assuming the risks and cuts thereof. They claim that confinement causes damage to people's physical and mental health and that it should be replaced by the isolation of the most exposed people, reducing restrictions on the rest of the population: by achieving collective immunity, that is, when a considerable part of the population develops immunity to the virus and stops the spread of the virus, the most vulnerable people will have fewer opportunities to encounter the virus.
The Barrington Charter has elicited many strong responses around the world, the latest published on October 14 by 80 public health researchers in the scientific journal The Lancet, arguing that "a dangerous lie is that of the immune group that is not based on scientific evidence." The paper states that "no evidence proves that the spontaneous spread of the virus SARS-CoV-2 [the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic has this official name] implies a lasting immunity to it" and that belief in it would put vulnerable people at risk.
The signatories to this second document acknowledge that the cutbacks that are being implemented today are the cause of popular despair and mistrust towards the authorities, but that they are nevertheless necessary, at least in the short term. "The aim of these restrictions is to limit SARS-CoV-2 infections to the lowest possible level, to be able to quickly detect and position outbreaks and respond quickly; with an effective and comprehensive system of search, testing, monitoring, isolation and surveillance to return to a quasi-normal situation where generalized restrictions are not needed." Experts with experience in infectious diseases say that at least 60% of the population is immune to the virus. It is currently estimated that at the latest 10% of the world's population has been infected with coronavirus.
In the face of the barullo, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has spoken:
"There have been discussions about the possibility of getting what's called 'group immunity' by letting the virus spread. Group immunity is used in the context of vaccines to refer to how a population can be protected when a percentage of vaccinees has been reached. For example, in the case of measles, achieving group immunity requires 95% of the population to be vaccinated. The remaining 5% will be protected against the spread of the virus among the others affected. In other words, group immunity is achieved by protecting people against the virus, not leaving them in a state of contagion. Letting yourself spread a dangerous virus that we still don't know at all is not clearly ethical. It's not an option. But we have many other possibilities. The World Health Organization recommends seeking, isolating, testing, human care, monitoring reports, quarantine, physical distancing, washing hands, masks, breathing standards, ventilation, avoiding agglomerations, etc. Countries are proving every day that those are the ones that work."
