By Makia Freeman

Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

Herd immunity, or community immunity as it is also known, is one of the main arguments used by those advocating vaccination to persuade other people to take vaccines. Herd immunity, so it is claimed, provides indirect protection to the unvaccinated. How? Here’s how the reasoning goes: if enough people get vaccinated, when a contagious disease hits a community, it spreads less quickly than if the majority were not vaccinated, since they are now protected. Thus, those unvaccinated few living among the vaccinated many can now enjoy some protection because the disease is finding it harder to spread and infect new individuals.

However, this argument is based on many assumptions and flaws, as we shall see…

Interestingly enough, in recent times a concept that is essentially the oppositeof herd immunity – i.e. viral shedding – has been in the news. You see, people using the argument of herd immunity generally claim that the unvaccinated help speed the spread of a disease, even encompassing those who are vaccinated. In other words, they claim that the unvaccinated can infect the vaccinated. The phenomenon of viral shedding, on the other hand, is showing that those who get vaccines get the virus in their body – even if it’s weak or attenuated – and the virus then sheds, can become contagious and can start spreading. In other words, the vaccinated can infect the unvaccinated.

So which is the more true concept: herd immunity or viral shedding? Who’s infecting whom?

Vaccine-Induced Herd Immunity is Full of Assumptions

To get to the bottom of this question, you need to take a close look at this notion of herd immunity. It contains the following assumptions:

1. Vaccines really are effective in protecting you against a disease;
2. Once you get a vaccine, you are protected for a long time, or for life against that disease;
3. Vaccines protect you from getting infected and transmitting the disease;
4. Herd immunity can be acquired through vaccination just as it can be acquired naturally (i.e. when a significant number of people in a community contract and overcome a disease, and then have natural antibodies against it).

Take the first assumption of vaccine efficacy. The big flaw with the herd immunity argument is that, by its very definition, it undermines the idea that vaccines actually work. If vaccines really were effective at protecting you against a disease, why would you worry that if those around got it, you would be more at risk or more in danger? If you’re protected, you’re protected, right? If the vaccine provides you genuine immunity to a disease, as Big Pharma, the CDC and the Western medical establishment like to claim, then it logically follows that it should be of no consequence to your health if you are surrounded by 1 or 100 contagious people.

The only way around this is if you believe that vaccines are effective yet contraindicated for some people, such as infants, pregnant women or the elderly. So you vaccinate yourself but not your baby or your grandmother, and you worry for their health because there is not enough herd immunity in your community. Given Big Pharma’s propensity to ratchet up the vaccine schedule on the entire population, there are not many people exempt anymore; take a look at this chart on the left or at National Vaccine Information Center to see how the schedule has changed over the last few decades for kids. However, even if you are in this (rare) scenario, there are still problems with the idea of herd immunity.

Take the second assumption of supposed lifelong immunity. If herd immunity is really so important to protect a community, that would presuppose that the vaccinated could fight off the disease – whenever it struck. So what happens after 5 years go by after you get your shot? 10 years? 20? 30? Even if you go and get your booster shots regularly, vaccine-induced immunity still wears off after time.