Twitter, not Trump, misleads on immunity
If being exposed to Covid gives us no protection from the virus, then why are we betting on a vaccine?
Is there anything Donald Trump could write on Twitter that would not upset the social media site’s moderators? Consider their reaction to his message from Sunday on his recovery from Covid. “A total and complete sign off from White House Doctors yesterday,” the president had said. “That means I can’t get it (immune), and can’t give it. Very nice to know!!!” Twitter responded by adding a warning label to Trump’s tweet, claiming that it had “violated the Twitter rules about spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to Covid-19.”
I presume that Twitter’s moderators are not party to discussions between the president and White House doctors, which means it must be the latter statement which upset them. But it makes no sense. As Trump himself said on Sunday, no one knows how long immunity from Covid lasts. Yet surely in implying that he is, for now, immune from catching the virus or passing it on, the president was merely echoing what is almost universal scientific belief.
That people who have recovered from the virus cannot immediately go down with it again is an assumption, for example, that is baked into Neil Ferguson’s model, which persuaded the Government to send us into lockdown in the first place. It divided the population into three groups: the infected, the uninfected and the immune. Moreover, the assumption that humans are capable of gaining immunity from Covid-19 lies behind all vaccine development programmes – if we can’t gain immunity, we are wasting billions on projects that are doomed to failure.
If exposure to Sars-cov-2, the virus which causes Covid-19, gave us no immunity at all, we would surely know by now – millions around the world would have been afflicted twice, or multiple times. Nor is there a lot of evidence to suggest that immunity easily wears off over a period of months – the time that Covid-19 has so far been with us. There have been very few reported cases of people apparently having caught the virus twice, and even they are complicated by the fact that some tests cannot distinguish between live and dead virus.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that Twitter is picking on Trump’s feed in a way that it doesn’t pick on other people’s. Who knows – and I’m guessing here, lest Twitter choose to block me – one might even wonder whether someone on Twitter’s team of moderators doesn’t want Trump to be re-elected. But we can be grateful to the social media site for at least one thing: it has inadvertently helped raise a subject that so many governments – not least our own – seem to have ignored: the role of immunity in tackling the pandemic.
According to antibody tests, between 6 and 7 per cent of the UK population have been exposed to the Sars-cov-2 virus and have physical manifestation of an immunity from further infection. That is over 4 million people walking around who should not be able to catch it again. Yet they will be subject to the same restrictions announced yesterday as everyone else. If they are rung up by NHS Test and Trace, they will be legally obliged, under pain of a £10,000 fine, to stay at home for the next 14 days, even though they probably cannot catch the virus or pass it on. In April, the Government talked of “immunity passports” to help society get back to normal. What happened to them?
Government projections for a second wave of the virus do not seem to take into account the possibility that the UK population has built up some degree of herd immunity. Even if the epidemic has not been stopped in its tracks, it is presumably being slowed by the fact that one in every 15 or so people it encounters have antibodies to bat it away. That may explain why much of London seems to be relatively lightly affected this time around, after having been the hotbed of infection in the spring.
Donald Trump might speak and write a lot of nonsense, but Sunday’s tweet wasn’t unreasonable. On the contrary, it was merely stating something which almost all scientists accept but which public policy seems to overlook. If anyone is providing “misleading” information, it is Twitter, by implying that immunity from Covid doesn’t exist.
‘The Denial’ by Ross Clark is published by Lume Books