Guest post: Diseases like the Black Death change societies
Originally a comment by Claire on Ask Doctor Oz next. (Excuse two guest posts from the same person in one day but if you people will insist on being wantonly informative and clarifying this way it simply can’t be helped.)
Herd immunity. For a pandemic. Fuck.
Herd immunity is a population specific term. Herd immunity is used in humans for very specific reasons. Calculating the vaccination rate required to reduce infections in a population. In a retrospective manner, looking at historical data. Projecting into the future in worse case scenarios and measuring against interventions and their efficacy.
By the time you’re working with populations, they’ve stopped being people and have become mere numbers. Epidemiologists have to remind themselves from time to time that there are people behind the number, but not think about it too often because that way madness lies.
Herd immunity is the worst case scenario in a population that could become immune to the disease over time. This occurs not because people change or the virus changes but because the makeup of the population changes. Most of the people unable to become immune die, those left restrict the virus’ ability to find a human host. Here’s the problem – this virus is zoonotic. It can infect other animals, much in the way that flu does. So achieving extinction is impossible. It can sit there happily mutating in a bird or a mammal of any species – (probably but not exclusively) chickens and pigs, respectively.
Dr Atlas is proposing an attempt to achieve herd immunity through natural selection. Yes, good old fashioned eugenics. Consider the Black Death. That epidemic killed between one and two thirds of the population of Europe. It signaled the end of feudalism and severely limited the genetic pool in people of European ancestry. (We white people are like clones compared with the rest of humanity).
Diseases like the Black Death change societies. I don’t know if Dr Atlas will like the result. Nor will the white supremacists. Battling a disease that can literally almost wipe out a continent’s worth of people is easier the more genetic variation you have. People of African ancestry have the most (it’s the oldest population, older = more time to recombine and mutate DNA). White people have the least. Not because of age exclusively, but because of one epidemic effect 670 years ago. Evolutionarily a blink but in terms of historical impact, it was huge.
Herd immunity assumes the possibility of immunity either natural or through vaccination. If long term immunity cannot be achieved, modern civilization is heading for the biggest transformation since the fall of the Roman empire which plunged European civilization into the Dark Ages or the Great Flood of Gun-Yu which heralded the beginning of dynastic succession in what later became China.
And if long term immunity isn’t possible? We may see the greatest transformation of a civilization you’ve ever seen. A global transformation. The biggest, most beautiful, in history.
A brilliant and informative piece, Claire. Copied, pasted and filed on my hard drive for future reference.
If “everyone is going to get it,” is now the Trump administration’s policy objective, then at the current American case fatality rate of approximately 3%, the United States can expect a death toll somewhere north of ten million people.
And on two completely different subjects, too!
For once, the fact that Trump isn’t playing with a full deck is the good news. Whether an effective vaccine – or, the way things are going, multiple vaccines – is developed isn’t up to him. He simply doesn’t hold all the cards here. It isn’t even up to the United States. In medical terms, and in business terms, a vaccine will be extremely valuable, even if it doesn’t provide long-term protection, and medical research is flush with cash to pursue it. Trump and his bizarre lackeys, like Dr. Atlas, won’t be able to shape a future in which everybody in America – or in the world – is infected with COVID even if they really want to.
Having gained some horrific insight into the Donald’s thought processes through listening to what he says he is, I believe that he has been told that the death rates among Blacks and Latinos are greater than that among whites. I believe, furthermore, that he has decided that COVID may be a good thing, then, if it preferentially kills people he thinks are weak or inferior. Did someone say eugenics? He is incapable of understanding that such rates are unlikely to be a genetic predisposition, but simply caused by the fact that more white people can work from home, and more Black and Latino people still have to be out there on the front lines of retail and service. More white people can send their kids to the private schools that are able to follow adequate COVID safety precautions, and more Black and Latino people have to send their kids wherever they can so they can work. Black people are even being asked to remove their COVID masks when they enter retail establishments in a way that white people aren’t.
The idea that being white gives a person better immunity to COVID for genetic reasons – an idea I am certain Trump has – is nonsense. It’s the structure of our society that reserves a greater likelihood of survival, of almost everything, for white people, not genetics.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/04/09/why-are-blacks-dying-at-higher-rates-from-covid-19/
Our society is changing, sometimes in contradictory ways – at the same time that Black Lives Matter has become practically mainstream, Vanilla ISIS has escalated to the point of invasive armed caravans taking potshots at other citizens. One way in which our society is not going to change is that not even a higher minority death rate from COVID is going to make us more white. Sorry, Donald, not sorry.
Another way that our society is likely changing permanently is that the move towards remote work among white-collar professionals will never be fully reversed. Acceptance of work from home has gotten to the point where it’s informing recruiting decisions: companies are giving up on hiring local workers or funding relocation in favor of casting a global net for top talent. When COVID lifts, these people may travel more, but they’re not relocating. In this way, an initial promise of the internet is drawing nearer. This alone will affect housing patterns, and schooling models, in a persistent manner.
There are too many organizations – including non-American organizations – working on a COVID vaccine for us not to have one by the end of next year. The Phase Three trial for for the Oxford vaccine begins in the United States tomorrow, and it’s the third one, after Moderna and Pfizer. Johnson & Johnson is up next.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/large-trials-oxford-covid-19-vaccine-begin-u-s-n1238887
It’s entirely possible that no vaccine will convey lasting immunity. It’s thus possible that COVID-19 will never be fully eradicated, and that we will enter into a prolonged game of whack-a-mole with COVID outbreaks and mutations. This is what we do with influenza every year, though COVID is obviously worse than influenza. We can do it with COVID too, and probably better, because COVID doesn’t seem to mutate as fast, perhaps only a quarter as fast. If we can’t eradicate it, we can probably keep up with it, though that will require continued investment in both medical research and public health.
This pandemic will change society. I hold out the hope that its changes will be positive: increased remote work will better spread the benefits of our increasingly stratified society; public health will be taken more seriously; and the massive changes people have lived through already may make the changes we require to address our climate change problem more possible.
Now I’m going to go vote for a better future.
Wow. So “herd immunity” is actually WHITE GENOCIDE!
Now you’ve gone and made me look up the Great Flood of Gun-Yu.
Herd immunity, trump? You first.
That’s the supreme irony for all the science haters and merchants of disinformation. Medical science is what broke humanity free from the chains of random events and natural selection as the principle determinants of which humans survive. Vaccination, arguably the greatest triumph in the history of medicine, has saved millions of lives. How many of the subsequent achievements of humankind (in the arts, philosophy, science, architecture, engineering, etc.) were made possible by the preservation of minds that otherwise would have been arbitrarily extinguished by disease?
We don’t have a vaccine for COVID, but we have generations of experience dealing with communicable disease. That’s always been our ace in the hole. Even the most virulent pathogens should be no match for our collective efforts. It must take a unique kind of evil to subvert that legacy for political purposes.
*blushes*
Thank you, Ophelia. I’m glad both of these posts were of interest.
Wantonly of interest, I tells ya.