Who first put forward the concept of "group immunity"?

1923 first put forward the concept of "group immunity". An American scholar made a survey on the spread of measles among children in Baltimore in the past 30 years. He found that when the number of children infected with measles reaches a certain scale, the number of newly infected children will be significantly reduced, making uninfected children safer.

Since then, mass vaccination has become more and more common and has become a public health strategy in many countries. The concept of "group immunity" is widely used in the prevention and control of infectious diseases. According to the report issued by Oxford University, "group immunization" is only applicable to infectious diseases, not to non-infectious diseases. The core of forming "group immunity" is that enough people need to have immune ability.

Extended data

British "Group Immunity" Strategy for COVID-19 Epidemic

Patrick Valance, Britain's chief scientific adviser, was the first to put forward the theory of "group immunity". In an interview with British Sky TV on 13, Patrick said that about 60% of the British people will be infected with COVID-19 virus, so that society will have "group immunity" against the future epidemic. At present, there are about 66 million people in Britain. According to Patrick's prediction, 40 million people are infected with COVID-19 virus.

The British government made this decision because it believed that the "containment" stage of the domestic epidemic had failed and had entered the "delay" stage, and the outbreak of the epidemic was inevitable. In order to postpone the high incidence of new coronary pneumonia from April in the traditional flu season to summer, so as to reduce the pressure faced by hospitals, the British government decided to tolerate the slow development of the epidemic, expecting most people to have no symptoms or only mild symptoms after recessive infection, so as to gain universal immunity of the population to control the epidemic.

World Wide Web-Is "Group Immunity" Reliable against Epidemic?