Herd immunity is not a strategy, it is a biological fact

[detbuch]

Originally Posted by PaulS

The idea behind herd immunity is that the strong survive, the weak will die and anyone who thinks they are vulnerable should just worry about themselves.

Republican empathy at its finest.

This also was a bit desperately funny. The three scientists in the video did not specify their political party affiliation or if they had one. One is a Swede, another is a Brit, and the third is of Indian descent and either a U.S. national or just working here. The Brit did claim, when they all actually disavowed any political motivations for their mission, that she was far from any Libertarian political leaning--the odds are they are not "Conservative," certainly two are not Republican, and that they are Progressive.

And what they mean by herd immunity as well as their proposal to achieve it does not comport with what you claim is the " idea behind herd immunity". They certainly don't say "vulnerable should just worry about themselves." They specifically say that the vulnerable should be protected. The Swede admitted that the one fault of the Swedish method of no lockdown was that they didn't protect (quarantine) those in the nursing homes in which the vast majority of deaths occurred.

And the title of this thread is a direct quote from one of the scientists in the video. They distinguished the notion of herd immunity being a strategy from the supposition that it is a goal. The goal is to achieve herd immunity via their strategy for doing so, and that herd immunity is ultimately the goal of any strategy. Vaccines are a way to achieve herd immunity. Flattening curve through lockdown is a temporary way of slowing down the virus so it doesn't overwhelm the hospital system until their are mitigations and cures developed. But it is not an attempt to totally remove the virus from the face of the earth. Once it's here, it will remain as do all the other colds and flu viruses, but for which we have created mitigating protocols. And from which we will have achieved a "herd immunity" in which antibodies are naturally or artificially created so the virus will not be a pandemic threat.

But then you probably didn't watch the video. And you saw an occasion to throw in a zinger about Republican empathy.