Sweden proves that "herd immunity" will have to wait until there's a vaccine

Swedish health officials have let the other shoe drop.

After partial statistics seemed to show that Sweden's relatively permissive approach to the COVID-19 pandemic had resulted in several times the deaths of the other Scandanavian countries without resulting in much progress toward developing "herd immunity," the Swedes have now conceded that only six percent of the country's population have developed antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.

"Herd immunity-" the point at which 60-70% of a population are immune to a virus and an outbreak begins to die out for lack of new people to infect- usually requires the development of a vaccine to help the process along. Swedish officials have denied that they were seeking "herd immunity" through their non-restrictive approach to the pandemic, though many in the United States and elsewhere have argued that the most realistic policy would be simply to allow the virus to spread in the hope of reaching "herd immunity" in as short a time as possible with minimum lasting damage to the economy.

The results from Sweden show plainly just how steep a hill must be climbed in order to accomplish that without a vaccine, and the terrible price a nation would have to pay in deaths to get there. As I've noted before, there is strong evidence that the universal wearing of masks could prevent a second wave of the virus and buy us the time to develop and distribute an effective vaccine with far fewer deaths. But regrettably, confusion over the purpose of masks- they're not to protect the wearer, but to prevent him or her from passing the virus on to others- have combined with a bizarre and extreme notion of individual freedom that the Founding Fathers would never have recognized to create strong opposition to legally requiring the wearing of masks, and the overwhelming majority of Americans are declining to wear them voluntarily.

The notion that one has a constitutional right to endanger the health of others is a bizarre one, but this is an hour in our history when bizarre political ideas are quite popular. After all, one of their chief proponents is the President of the United States.

For a few more months.