We are hearing lately about ‘herd immunity’ as a preventative or a projectible outcome of properly managing COVID. Might this be a Darwinian social experiment?
First of all, human beings are not simply animals. We are not a ‘herd.’
I cannot render commentary on the scientific viability of conflicting scientific reports on how to reach a so called, herd immunity, but I can tell you as a careful thinker, that when people start playing with other people’s lives and devaluing life as if we are a herd of buffalo on the Great Plains, it makes me real nervous.
Good epidemiologists are saying that without a vaccine, to reach herd immunity it would cost us about .5% of the 70% that would need to be infected in order to reach this status. In America alone, that would be 1,050,000 people. It might look like a Hitlerian holocaust.
Social Darwinism advances on the premise that individual ‘life’ is not important if one is not strong and that man is not made in the image of God, endowed with some kind of inherent dignity. Selection (or death) is natural, and the strong are fit to survive. It says that we can sacrifice a few for the herd. It is a mindset that assumes we can make decisions on the assumption that man is just another animal, another ‘herd’ so to speak.
It also means, that we can experiment like Sweden is currently doing. As the tale begins to evolve there, it might be difficult to sanitize the human cost that will come from their public health patriotism called ‘folkhälsonationalism.’
If we extrapolate out from this, we better realize that Health Ministers and Secretaries of the Departments of Health are social engineers, paving the road to our ideological destinies. The Fauci-types around the world are proceeding on a set of assumptions that are not simply data-driven. They are making decisions that are politically, socially, and scientifically based. Letting science lead may not be all it is cracked up to be. People are spiritual and social beings. We have tear ducts too.
When society and secular humanists begin to minimize human dignity, human life, and an ethic that values the preservation of the weak, Christians need to say, “Why are you so quick to send people to their death? What is your secondary agenda here? What are the foundations on which you are making these decisions?”
None of us can pretend that we are innocent in the results of the social experiment evolving before us. If you think that COVID spread is not your responsibility, you are patently wrong. The protection of human life is a precious thing. It is our ‘herd’ responsibility. We need to preserve the herd, not sacrifice the .5% so we can move on.
Beyond this, some are saying that it is possible to contract the disease repeatedly and that antibodies after contraction may not be a safe protection over the long haul. If that is the case, there my never be herd immunity at all. The buffalo are chasing a dream off the cliff.
At this time more than ever, we need people that will lead the herd in another direction, opening things up with careful, discrete, and auspicious wisdom. We need leadership that has character, integrity, and sympathy to accompany scientific decision-making. It is only in this way that we will prove that we are more than a herd but actually a community of rationally, thinking people created in the image of God.
