10 January

Here's a vital scientific reason why what we're doing with Covid won't work, can never work, and will maim and kill lots of people, forever, unless we change course. Our strategy is called 'hybrid immunity', meaning allowing people to become immune to Covid through repeated vaccinations and infections. Based on peoples' lived experiences with things like colds. Here's the reason that's scientific codswallop. Humans have never achieved immunity to a SINGLE pathogen, without vaccination. You need to get everybody primed at about the same time, so the pathogen has no chance to evolve its way out of the immunity. You also need a powerful vaccine that helps prevent transmission as well as severe disease and death. We don't have a vaccine like that, for Covid. And more than half the population isn't even bothering to get vaccinated anyway. So we're relying upon infection to do the job. But it's physically and mathematically *impossible* to do, with infection alone. As Ellie describes, the levels of immunity in the community are all over the shop, using that approach, there's no chance we'll get population immunity. And that's also lethally dangerous, because it allows the virus to keep on evolving, to evade the little immunity we do have. So it's always just a matter of time until more lethal variants arrive, killing more people. And not at all restricted to just the old or vulnerable. Spanish Flu killed the young more than the old, and Covid could easily evolve to do the same.