https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/labuan-first-among-territories-and-states-in-malaysia-to-hit-herd-immunity
KUALA LUMPUR - The Labuan federal territory (FT) on Tuesday (July 27)
became the first among Malaysia's three FTs and 13 states to reach 'herd
immunity' with 80 per cent of its adult population fully vaccinated
against Covid-19, Bernama news agency reported.
Although we should be proud of how Labuan managed to get herd-immunity, I just cannot look back at the wastes and huge financial and human losses which led to this herd-immunity. What is worse, it shows very clearly that nobody in the world seem to understand what Herd-immunity is all about. Not even professors and doctors are aware of the real purpose of Herd-immunity.
The best definition is the crowd-sourced encyclopaedia, Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity
Herd immunity (also called herd effect, community immunity, population immunity, or mass immunity) is a form of indirect protection from infectious disease
Which means that the most important purpose of Herd-immunity is to protect people. The question is what kind of people?
for individuals who lack immunity.
That is, Herd-immunity is to protect the unvaccinated people.
Which means that we can stop vaccinating people because even the unvaccinated can be protected. There is no more need for vaccine passes, forced vaccinations and educating people about vaccinations.
In Labuan, there is no more need for all the SOP and any discussion on vaccine passes. We can allow vaccinated people to mix with unvaccinated people, without any fear that there will be any infection among the unvaccinated people.
The reality is bad. If you remove all restrictions, the situations in Labuan will be even worse. This is sufficient evidence that Labuan has not reached Herd-immunity. We may need to achieve 95% full vaccination of people within 3 months in order to achieve Herd-immunity, if ever.
You see, the percentage of vaccinated people required to achieve Herd-immunity depends on vaccine efficiency and efficiency of recovered patients but these depend on the time the vaccines were taken and the time that patients recover from infections.
For vaccination, in 6 months, the vaccine efficiency is only 20% from the maximum of 95% for Pfizer. Similar drop in efficiency should be expected for recovered patients and other vaccines.
I said Labuan Herd-immunity is wasteful because there is no point in using vaccine passes to stop the spread of the diseases any more. We could have used the vaccine passes to open up its economy safely earlier instead of opening the economy dangerously to even the unvaccinated. It is now too late because vaccine passes are no longer required because we have achieved Herd-immunity.
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