The Guardian view on 'herd immunity': yes it was 'part of the plan' | Editorial
The government's early approach to the Covid-19 crisis, despite its denials, was to let the disease spread
In his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn developed the notion of the "paradigm" as a way of understanding how a community of researchers makes its judgments. A shared paradigm, observed Kuhn, is a mode of seeing a problem that makes certain presumptions and privileges particular perspectives. It sees things. But it also misses things.
As the coronavirus pandemic spread across the world, the British government relied on the wrong paradigm. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, has insisted that herd immunity - the idea that allowing a virus to spread will eventually build up sufficient resistance in a population - was never a "part of the plan" in the battle against Covid-19. But today's Guardian's investigation into the government's early handling of the crisis leaves little room for doubt: the concept was fundamental to the government's decision-making in the crucial months of February and March, as most of the rest of the world took a different path. It was abandoned only when it became clear that the NHS would be utterly overwhelmed and hundreds of thousands of Britons could conceivably die.
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