We Need Some Herd Immunity! A Satirical Song

6 June 2020 (Wall Street International)* — After the Coronavirus began in Wuhan, the Chinese government provided one model for containment and elimination: complete lockdown. This model was not felt to be satisfactory to most Western democracies and soon the expression “herd immunity” began to be mentioned quite frequently.

The UK toyed with the idea. Sweden seems to be suffering from it. Basically, the concept meant that, in lieu of a vaccine, folks should just go about their normal, everyday experiences and whoever caught the virus would either die or become immune.

If about 60% of a population could catch and survive the virus, and become immune to it for a substantial amount of time, this would spell the end of the disease in that population.

The problem was that herd immunity was, basically, abandoning the infirm and elderly to a death sentence. Also, many folks who catch the virus require hospitalization and any real herd immunity experiment would severely tax or overwhelm any nation’s health care system.

Additionally, we saw in the USA that the most vulnerable to the disease were often folks who had been marginalized by the economic and political system. Herd immunity in the USA would have meant massive amounts of poor and minority folks dying while middle class and affluent white folks kept on, well, being middle class and affluent white folks.