Daniel Kalla is the author of 12 novels – including his newest, Lost Immunity – and the head of the emergency medicine department at St. Paul’s Hospital in downtown Vancouver.
When we think of vaccines, most of us focus on how they will protect our families and ourselves. But the overarching role of vaccination is to protect the population at large, especially the most vulnerable among us, through herd immunity. If we think of viruses as raindrops, then vaccines work like raincoats for each person who gets one, while herd immunity acts like an umbrella for the whole community. In rough terms, 70 percent of a population needs to be immune to an infectious threat – through vaccination or previous exposure – before herd immunity can be achieved. And since no vaccine is 100 percent effective, we need to immunize even more than 70 percent of the population to make the umbrella in our analogy waterproof.
Find out more on this topic and read the full article here at Opinion: The ‘vaccine hesitant’ are a threat to society. But we must show them compassion – The Globe and Mail
