You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Kyre comments on Rationality Quotes October 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Tyrrell_McAllister 01 October 2014 11:02PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (236)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Kyre 04 October 2014 09:13:03AM *  6 points [-]

I believe this is incorrect. The required proportion of the population that needs to be immune to get a herd immunity effect depends on how infectious the pathogen is. Measles is really infectious with an R0 (number of secondary infections caused by a typical infectious case in a fully susceptible population) of over 10, so you need 90 or 95% vaccination coverage to stop it speading - and why it didn't much of a drop in vaccination before we saw new outbreaks.

R0 estimates for seasonal influenza are around 1.1 or 1.2. Vaccinating 100% of the population with a vaccine with 60% efficacy would give a very large herd immunity effect (toy SIR model I just ran says starting with 40% immune reduces attack rate from 35% to less than 2% for R0 1.2).

(Typo edit)