The idea of ‘hybrid immunity’ seems to draw heavily upon human experience with influenza. A vague hand-waving…

The idea of ‘hybrid immunity’ seems to draw heavily upon human experience with influenza. A vague hand-waving idea that through living with it for centuries, we eventually reached a workable equilibrium. Couple of questions about that, for me. /1

While it’s likely impossible to know how many humans have died from influenza in history, it’s surely hundreds of millions, based on the records we do have of later times. So if that’s your model for making a disease ‘endemic’, you’re sacrificing huge numbers of people. /2

And just as we notice deaths less if they’re constant and ongoing (humans perceive change rather than steady states), rather than in epidemic peaks, our Covid strategy is focused on current death rates. Rather than deaths across generations to come, or the past 4 years. /3 https://t.co/sVnKRTiB0O

It’s always the area under the curve, not the peaks, that show how much long-term damage is being done. So even if this retrospective story of influenza’s history with us, much of which we don’t know, is true, it was a terrible price to pay to reach today. /4

And there’s a humdinger of a twist to this story as well, in the data we do have about influenza. The socially acceptable levels of mortality from the disease are historically almost brand new. Only in the past 150-odd years has influenza mortality reached ‘acceptable’ levels. /5 https://t.co/QsomqIcn4s

Not coincidentally corresponding pretty precisely with the emergence of public health practice. Deliberate, targeted action drove that mortality down. Not centuries of ‘living with’ influenza, generating supposed hybrid immunity through constant infection. /6 https://t.co/eEZZMR3z7o

The idea that by vaccinating and allowing constant mass infection, we’ll achieve this sort of trajectory, doesn’t seem to match the historical experience. At no point in the past did we decide to live with influenza. Until we decided NOT to, it killed at will. /7 https://t.co/poqokqiJh3

Like most of our collective life now, we’re weighed down with slogans and framings that are entirely political, with little to no connection to reality. Or just enough resemblance to make a narrative seem believable, even if it’s complete nonsense. /8

When you launch an assault on everything public, on collective life itself, which is our politics since the late-1970s, all that’s left to give an echo of that old collective life is slogans and other forms of resonating propaganda. Political earworms. /end