The U.S. has joined other countries in looking to antibody testing as a
key tool for economic revival.
-We think it will be a tool to help us get people back to work.
-We want to go back to work quickly, but safely.
And that’s what’s happening.
But that’s created controversy.
-There are a lot of tests out there that are, just,
creating lots of false positives.
-We don’t currently have a great test to tell if
someone is immune or not.
Just because they have antibodies doesn’t necessarily
mean that they're immune.
And even if perfected, these tests may create problems of their own.
-It’s important to look back into history because we don’t want the
past to become prelude.
-So, imagine we’ve got great tests that we believe are
picking up immunity.
Before we roll something out like this, I think we have to be
really sure that we’re going to take care of those left behind.
The alternative is that we end up with a
two-tier society where there’s some people who are employable who
can go out in public and others who don’t have jobs
and who can’t feed their family.
And that’s both unfair in terms of
how we distribute goods in this society.
But it also might have consequences for public health
because it may incentivize people to go out and try to expose
themselves to risks in order to have access to the economy and access
to public life.
And that’s not something you want.
History shows that concern isn’t just theoretical, says Stanford historian
Kathryn Olivarius.
-Epidemics and pandemics provide any society great challenges.
But the real danger is that these
moments exacerbate all sorts of existing inequalities that we already
have in our societies.
One example?
The way some Southern communities dealt with
yellow fever in the 1800s.
-The disease reached epidemic proportions.
Um, and this cast a much longer shadow, um,
than just mortality.
Those who survived, now so-called acclimated citizens, uh,
their lives had been permanently transformed.
Now you could, you could get a job.
There were certain people that you could marry.
There were certain social networks that
you could tap into.
Um, banks were happier to extend you credit.
All of these elements of life in the South
were suddenly open to you.
Um, and so this became a pathway
essentially to prosperity, um, a kind of prerequisite for having a job,
a credential, like having a university degree or having language skills.
This was touted as the sort of Rubicon moment.
But of course, it also created, um, some very
pernicious side effects.
Epidemiological discrimination became one of many forms of
discrimination that riddled society.
Acclimation governed everything from the price of slaves to the ability
to get life insurance, and newcomers would even seek out
infection in the hopes of becoming immune to the disease.
-I’ve seen examples of young men, um, hopping into the beds of their
recently dead friends.
They’re literally risking their lives seeking
sickness as the pathway to prosperity.
Over time, instead of improving health care
to decrease the death toll,
the leaders of New Orleans came to see the reoccurring waves
of yellow fever as little more than natural selection at work.
-The richest and most powerful all incorporated acclimations into their
sort of genesis stories crafted as a demonstration of a person’s
manliness, of their worth, of their bravery, a sort of
catchall statement of character.
It becomes the attitude of the government, um, essentially,
that the only solution to yellow fever is not expensive sanitation efforts.
Um, in fact, the solution to yellow fever is more yellow fever.
-You know they told us, Tucker, to follow the science.
Well, what science?
With frustration growing over the lengthy mitigation measures
scientists say are necessary to combat Covid-19…
-I hate that we have to see each other as a disease now.
…some pundits and U.S. policymakers are advocating that
more people, not less, need to be infected.
-Herd immunity is the best way to get to a place where grandparents
can once again hug their grandchildren.
Herd immunity can occur when a critical mass of the population has
been infected or vaccinated, helping to slow the virus’s course.
-They tell you to hunker down.
Tens of millions of Americans as a result
of this mitigation that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx are focused on will not have
developed any immunity to this.
But trying to gain herd immunity without a vaccine is very risky,
says epidemiologist David Dowdy.
-What we do in the next one to three months should not be dictated
by a desire to achieve herd immunity in the long term.
So, the only way we’re going to get herd immunity,
uh, to Covid-19 without a vaccine is for large
proportions of the population to get sick.
More than half of the entire population
would have to get infected, uh, in order to even approach
herd immunity to this disease.
-It’s not a good idea.
In some ways, we know less about coronavirus
now than people knew about smallpox in the 18th century.
Back then, in order to gain immunity to smallpox, people would
sometimes seek it out.
-If you knew someone who had a mild case of smallpox, you would
get the scabs.
You would grind them up.
You would either snort them or, uh, more commonly, you
would just make a little cut in the arm and put some of that in
and tie it up.
And you would get the disease.
Presumably it was a mild case, but it wasn’t necessarily and
some people died from the inoculation.
That’s directly comparable to having a coronavirus
party because people will die from it.
For those who believe social distancing measures are preventing
herd immunity to the coronavirus, the history of smallpox offers
another lesson.
-Even when there was a vaccine, it took another almost 200 years to
achieve eradication, and that was by a very intensive vaccination
program that ended in, you know, in the 1970s.
So, in terms of herd immunity for coronavirus, I think it
would be very difficult to obtain without a vaccine.
And that was with a virus where exposure clearly provided long-term
immunity to those lucky enough to survive.
-If the population in general were more informed about how infectious
disease works, how, how we get sick there, that would definitely
have an impact on our political response.
We need to understand this a lot better than we do.
-I think when you’re in a crisis, you grasp at straws and that’s okay.
But I think the more we are led by the
public health experts and the less by ordinary politics,
the better we will be.
So, there’s a whole bunch of scientific history where we can
learn about the same kinds of things, especially the worrisome
things, our tendency towards hierarchy, our tendency towards
discrimination, our tendency to forget the least well-off amongst us.
That those are parts of the human condition that should be warning
signs because we’ve seen all of those things happen and it hasn’t
painted a rosy picture.