Vaccine or herd immunity?

Canada’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been well-articulated for the short term in the form of disease suppression to ensure that our health care system is not overwhelmed. Overall our governments have managed to maintain adequate capacity in our hospitals and clinics to handle COVID-19 and the regular health care load. The major black mark on the way we have handled the disease is in relation to our elderly in long-term care facilities. This now appears not to be specific to COVID-19 but the pandemic has exposed the weaknesses in our long-term care homes. With the publicity our long-term care homes have received it seems possible that these problems will now receive the attention they deserve.

On the other hand, Canada’s full strategy to address COVID-19 has not been well communicated to the populace. Is our way forward dependent on a vaccine or herd immunity? This question must be explored and fully communicated to the Canadian public. For the sake of argument, I would like to suggest that our national strategy should be achievement of herd immunity. The rationale for this is that most authorities warn that the earliest that a vaccine will be available is by the summer of 2021 and it could be much longer than that. Most of us cannot wait that long for our way of life to resume some normalcy. In addition, all governments cannot wait that long; to be blunt- we cannot afford the current path. If we accept this position, our goal should be to attain herd immunity. Now that the world has learned more about COVID-19, I think there is a way forward.

Accordingly, we should relax our procedures so that a sufficient portion of the population is exposed to the SARS-Cov2 virus to allow 50 to 70% of the population to develop immunity. This is where we should use the knowledge that the world has learned about COVID-19 to make the cost of herd immunity acceptable to Canadians. There is a lot of information indicating that a deficiency of vitamin D in the Canadian (and world) population has made COVID-19 about 10 times worse than it should be in terms of morbidity and mortality. https://vitamindcovid.blogspot.com/2020/05/vitamin-d-covid-19-and-me.html I would argue that if we make the Canadian population vitamin D sufficient, the effects of COVID-19 can be mitigated enough to be acceptable to the public. Thus we require a program that creates vitamin D sufficiency in our population by sunlight exposure and/or oral supplementation immediately with step-wise opening of the economy during the summer. The aim should be herd immunity before the onset of seasonal influenza. My concern is that COVID-19 combined with seasonal influenza will be far more deleterious to the health of our population than sequential COVID-19 followed by seasonal influenza. At the same time, we know that the most vulnerable Canadians are those in our nursing homes; we will require special consideration for this population.

This will not be a popular suggestion or solution to the problem facing us as a nation but we need to have this discussion now. I do not think that we should continue without a clear goals.