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Herd immunity: why the figure is always a bit vague – The Conversation UK
We’ll achieve herd immunity when 60% of the population is immune to COVID. No, wait, make it 70%. Or is it 80%?
Nearly 100 years ago, two British researchers, William Topley and Graham Wilson, were experimenting with bacterial infections in mice. They noticed that individual survival depended on how many of the mice were vaccinated. So the role of the immunity of an individual needed to be distinguished from the immunity of the entire herd.
Fast forward a century and the concept of herd immunity is now widely discussed in government dispatches and newspaper articles. But what does it actually mean?
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