When you understand how viruses need a certain sized Petri dish of human population to survive, and if you take away that number through herd immunity—post-infection immunity, vaccine—then you take away that infection’s fidelity. Vaccines are given not just for individuals; they are given as a public health measure. When you and I go get our annual flu vaccine, or we have our children obtain all their childhood shots, we are doing it and we think we are doing it for ourselves or for our children. As an individual, we much prefer our loved ones and ourselves not be ravaged with the coming year’s flu. And that is true, we are desirous of not getting ill.
But the other reality is, we are also a part of a larger group of responsible citizens attempting to minimize the flu within our community, attempting to prevent an epidemic. If you immunize a statistical number of people within a given population with the flu vaccine—or nearly any vaccine for that matter—and you add to that those who had the flu, you have achieved herd immunity, you are taking away or are attempting to take away the viral breeding ground. Vaccines reflect the Spock Principle from Star Trek: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, which outweigh the needs of the one.
Another way of looking at immunizations, when you were vaccinated or your children are vaccinated with the seasonal flu vaccine, or the mumps-measles-rubella MMR vaccine as well as the polio vaccine and the diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus DPT vaccine, you are not only attempting to prevent viral disease in yourself and your loved ones, which is all well and good; you also are a member of a community with social obligations attempting to prevent an epidemic. It is a social contract we have with each other.
The magic number seems to be around 80%. If eight in ten people are immune to a pathogen, especially viral buggers, the scoundrel won’t be able to find its next victim. As the image shows, those red-hot with a virus won’t spread infection if the herd in gray are immune.
John Bershof, MD
John Bershof, MD is a plastic surgeon who has been in private practice for over 25 years. He is the author of numerous medical articles as well as the first textbook of medicine for mobile phones, entitled skynetMD 2005-2015. An essay entitled Gin & Tonics, Clerics, and Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?, which was extracted from one of his future as yet published books was featured in The Antioch Review.
While working on the medical textbook skynetMD for mobile phones, Dr. Bershof, perhaps not too surprisingly became more interested in the backstories of medical history, like who was Lou Gehrig, what is Lou Gehrig's disease, what was his lifetime batting average for the New York Yankees—.340, nineteenth overall—and who invented baseball anyway. Questions such as these piqued Bershof's interest. Having read At Home 2010 by Bill Bryson, his engrossing narrative journeys room-by-room through his Victorian English countryside home, a former rectory, where each room is a chapter about domesticity, about home. It occurred to Dr. Bershof that in similar vein he could take the reader disease-by-disease as jumping off points into human history, science, medicine—his canvas blank, no subject not within reach—and learn a little medicine along the journey.
The ability of a book that is heavily fortified with science and history to connect with a general readership can be challenging; Dr. Bershof through storytelling, humor, jumping off points and personal anecdotes, accomplishes it, written in a language fleeced of the jargon that normally accompanies such narratives. The first two books, The First History of Man published in 2020 and The Second History of Man published in 2021 are available in print, ebook and audio. The Third History of Man is in final stages of editing to be published in 2022, with more volumes to come after that.
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