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**Hugh** · 30-07-2022, 13:18

That says Sir Patrick Vallance - Whitty isn’t mentioned (I had looked in this site and others, couldn’t find any Whitty references, which is why I asked).

Anyway, if you read the "Coronavirus: lessons learned to date: Sixth Report of the Health and Social Care Committee and Third Report of the Science and Technology Committee of Session 2021–22", you would see your interpretation in error.

https://committees.parliament.uk/pub...78687/default/

Page 33

Quote:

The initial policy: flattening the peak

79. There has been considerable debate as to whether the early policy of the Government was one of seeking to achieve so-called “herd-immunity”. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention defines community immunity/herd immunity as:
A situation in which a sufficient proportion of a population is immune to an infectious disease (through vaccination and/or prior illness) to make its spread from person to person unlikely.

Even individuals not vaccinated (such as newborns and those with chronic illnesses) are offered some protection because the disease has little opportunity to spread within the community. Also known as herd immunity.102

80. Non-pharmaceutical interventions such as lockdowns, and the testing and isolation of covid cases and their contacts, are tools of temporary application. Once they are lifted, there is nothing to stop transmission resuming. When Sir Patrick Vallance said at a Government press conference on 12 March 2020 “it’s not possible to stop everybody getting it and it’s also actually not desirable because you want some immunity in the population. We need to have immunity to protect ourselves from this in the future”103 he was, in a sense, merely stating what were thought to be the facts of the time. Sir Patrick, and Ministers, have insisted that this statement was not a policy to seek herd immunity but a description of the situation.

Matt Hancock wrote, as Secretary of State, on 14 March 2020:
We have a plan, based on the expertise of world-leading scientists. Herd immunity is not a part of it. That is a scientific concept, not a goal or a strategy. Our goal is to protect life from this virus, our strategy is to protect the most vulnerable and protect the NHS through contain, delay, research and mitigate…

… it would, however, be an overstatement to say that the Government and its advisers were promoting the acquisition of covid-19 to accelerate herd immunity in the population. But, in early Spring 2020, given that no alternative strategy was being implemented, that was the effective consequence.