Coronavirus Vaccine vs Herd Immunity - Which Is Better? (Is Sweden Wrong?)

Health Champions.

Is quarantine and lockdown the best way to deal with the coronavirus epidemic and is a

vaccine the only way to get back to a normal life or are there other options may be a little

more relaxed like what's Sweden's doing that can accomplish many of the same things today

we'll explore all of these questions and we will talk about how you can change the odds.

coming right up hey I'm Dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor in a former Olympic decathlete

and if you want to truly Master Health by understanding how the body really works make

sure you subscribe and hit that notification Bell so you don't miss anything early on when

the coronavirus first started spreading I think a lot of us were under the impression

that if we just wash our hands and wear our face masks then this nuisance will go away

in a couple the weeks as we have seen by now the epidemic has reached very quickly every

corner of the planet so then they started talkin about not preventing the spread but

slowing the spread flattening the curve and that has been successful in most cases but

now we kind of realize that it here to stay there will be times where it increases and

there will be some decreases but it's not really going away just like we have gotten

used to talking about the flu season unfortunately we might be looking forward to Corona season

as well and if we look at the new cases in the world that kind of speaks of that story

that it's going to stick around for a while we see the red line here's a 7-Day average

of new cases so in March it was still increasing but then for the last 5 - 6 weeks it's been

holding pretty steady right between 75 and a 100,000 new cases per day or we any closer

to a normal life won't if we have an increase of the epidemic then we increase the constraints

we increase the protective measures we get control we get a plateau and then it decreases

and then we feel safe so we open up things we relaxed thanks a little bit but if we don't

have a widespread immunity when we start opening things back up then we're just asking for

another wave and that's what they're afraid of that we don't really have enough immunity

to protect us anytime we relax we're going to have a second wave and maybe a third and

maybe a fourth and that will keep on going normal life probably can only come back after

we have immunity when enough people are immune then there's not enough people in left to

contaminate anymore to infect so one way to get immunity is to become infected you catch

the virus your immune system fights that you recover and now you have immunity there are

getting a little bit about how long it'll be but they're pretty sure that you're going

to have immunity for at least the rest of the season then after that he might be like

the flu where it'll come back in a slightly different version but if you fight it off

one season that you're probably safe for That season and if you fought it off on your own

then you can probably do it again so that immunity even though it may not be forever

you have pretty much a hundred percent immunity. The other way to gain immunity is with a vaccine

so instead of the live virus the full strength virus they weaken it little bit and they inject

it's and now your body senses an intruder and your body starts making antibodies to that

weakened virus now that is probably not going to be quite as effective. You can get some

good immunity but you don't know if you have that level of immunity the key to everything

here is called R naught that's the reproductive factor it's how fast does the virus replicate

in human hosts so it's depending on three different factors and P stands for the probability

of transmitting how virulent how pathogenic is this virus what's the probability that

if an infected person meets another person that there will be an infection the second

variable is called c and that's the number of contacts per day that a person makes.

So if an infected person meets 1 person or if they

meet 10 people there is a difference the more people you meet the more likely you spread

it around and the last factor is L or latency so the longer it takes between infection and

symptoms the more likely that you'll give it to a lot of people if there's a very short.

You figure out quickly that you're sick and you stop spreading it but if you don't know

for a week or even longer then you can meet hundreds of people and pass it on the higher

all of these factors are the greater R naught is So how does that relate to herd immunity

Well, the R value for Coronavirus has been estimated at about 2 and 1/2 some estimates have gone

as high as 5.7 but they're not really sure because there's a lot of variables in there

but let's say that the R-value is 2.5 so each person that gets infected passes it on to

two and a half people on average before they know they're infected and they stop spreading

it but if we have 60% of the population is immune if 60 people out of every hundred are

already immune then they can only pass it on to 40 protential people out of every

hundred they meet to even if the pathogenicity is 2.5 then we got the R-value down to 1

and that's a critical juncture because anything over 1 means the infection is going to grow

if every person infects more than one person even if it's just 1.01 it will

keep growing if it's less than 1 even 0.99 then it will die down and if we get our immunity

up higher than the R-value goes even lower another way of looking at this is just kind

of thinking about it also that these squares 10 squares represent 100% of the population

initially no one has immunity so 100% of people can get it and they can pass it on to 100%

of the population so we have 100% of spread-ability if you will but let's say that 30% of people

gain immunity so now that's three out of ten people are immune they can't get it and therefore

they can't give it to someone else now 70% of people are available to get it but also

own they can only give it to 70% of other people so now we're down to 49% of the potential

contact from the first example so already we've reduced the number of contacts the spread-ability

by 51% so this grows pretty quickly by the time we have 50% immunity then we have reduced

spreadability by 75% by the time we're at 60% now we have reduced it by 84% and this

is where they believe that we have somewhere between this principle in this principle that

we are not going to spread that virus that it's going to decline but that doesn't mean

that everyone is safe because some people can still get it and If You're vulnerable

if you're high risk group it could still be devastating for you but and on a societal

level that's critical because it's not growing anymore and if we get up to 80% now we have

reduced the spread-ability by 96% because only 20% can get it and they can only give it to another

20% so we only have 4% of the potential infectious contact left as you can see there's no herd

immunity in the beginning but as this thing catches on then it kind of increases exponentially

in our favor so immunity herd immunity is kind of like an S curve we can never get to

100% but we don't have to we just need to probably get to 60 or maybe 80% and then it

will slow down to the point where we don't need to worry about it but as little as 20%

has already reduced the contact the Infectious potentially infectious contact by 36% so already

at this level there's some noticeable effects there's been a lot of talk about Sweden and

herd immunity and a lot of people are accusing them of risking people's lives

in the pursuit of herd immunity but it's important to understand

that that was never an explicit goal that was not something that Sweden is going for

or attempting is just something that they're aware of as a potential benefit as this thing

progresses at first they thought they might get herd immunity at a level of 60% but very

recently they have some indications that it might happen at a lower level than that Here are some

interesting numbers 0.26% of the population in Sweden has been confirmed cases so far

and in Stockholm which is the biggest city it's about twenty 25% of the population they

have 0.41% of the population being infected that's pretty typical the big cities get hit

harder because there's more crowded-ness There is more contact however when they did some measurements

they found that even though these numbers are very very low as much as 10% of the population

in Stockholm was already immune on April 10th and the way this is going the trend they are

estimating that sometime in May that they will reach 30% and that sometime in June they

will reach 50% and by that time they will mostly probably have reached herd immunity

and they'll be able to more or less go back to normal but this number I find very interesting

that already we probably have because we have pets some around 30% immunity at the same

time that there's 0.4% confirm cases that's about a 70 times difference that means for every

person who's a confirmed case there's up to 70 people who have been infected and have

recovered or who didn't even know that they had it so there's an enormous number of people

behind the scenes that are getting infected and are moving this herd immunity forward

without becoming part of the statistics now let's talk about vaccines a little bit because

a lot of people are waiting for the vaccine as the Holy Grail as the thing that's going

to turn everything around but it doesn't quite work like that vaccines can be reduce the

risk but they cannot eliminate the risk so here is the vaccine Effectiveness according

to the CDC for the last 10 or 12 years and will we see here the green is the effectiveness

of the vaccine for that year so it kind of depends on how quickly the virus changes and

how well they can judge and select the right strains so some years it's been as low as

20% and other years it's been as high as sixty something on average the vaccine has about

a 44% Effectiveness it means it reduces the risk of getting the flu but it doesn't eliminate

it so what I'm talkin about these vaccines it's the flu vaccine we don't have a coronavirus

vaccine we don't know if and when we're going to get one but chances are because they're

both viruses and they're similar in some respects that these parallels would be kind of useful if

we have a 44% Effectiveness flu Effectiveness against infection that means roughly we get

15 million infections in the u.s. per year instead of 26 million so we're still going to

have a lot of flu around and it also is estimated that there is a 51 to 65% protection against

death and this has been done in children and that sounds quite substantial it sounds like

wow it's going to save half of all the children who get vaccines but let's look at what those

numbers mean the flu deaths in children from the year 2010 to 2014. It's a four-year period.

0 to 19 years old we estimate that they had 6.6 million flu cases and that's based on

the fact that there's 82 million people in that age range and an average 8% of the population

any given year gets the flu out of those 6.6 million cases there were 358 deaths and 26%

of those who died were vaccinated and 74% of them were not. In that time period

we had 48% of children on average were vaccinated against the flu.

So if we take a graphic illustration of this then the green here would

be the children that were vaccinated and died and the red would be the ones who didn't get

vaccinated and died now how do we compare that to the average how do we make sense of

that if the vaccine had no effect at all it was no difference at all then we expect 48%

of the kids who got vaccinated to die and 52% who didn't die so the children who got

saved the beneficial effect of the vaccine it is considerable it is definitely statistical

and it takes them from 265 to 190.

So it was 75 lives were saved by the vaccines that is during a four-year.

So that makes it 18 per year that were saved now that is if we did 44 million more vaccines

then we could save those lives so is that a good idea? Well some people would say

oh absolutely every life is sacred Naturally by then we also have to ask is there a downside

are there any drawbacks other than just the cost of delivering 44 million more vaccines

are there any adverse reactions? Well according to the CDC they're very rare 1.3 life-threatening

reactions / 1 million vaccination so if we give 44 million more vaccinations will have

57 life-threatening reactions per year does it doesn't mean that these 57 kids died it means

that if they didn't get emergency care at that point they probably or possibly would

but those are severe immediate anaphylactic type reactions what about non-serious reactions

Well they did some research on that and now they found that 19% of people who got vaccinated

children got vaccinated had some kind of reaction and this would be something like a fever or

nausea or a swelling at the injection site or aches and pains so if we give 44 million more

vaccinations we have 8.4 million mild non-serious reactions and this was one study that found

the 19% we don't really know because according to this study which was on ncbi on National

Institute of Health the government site these things are usually not reported people get

their vaccine if nothing happens right then and there they go home and the kid gets a

little fussy They Don't Really worry about it but is it possible that out of these 8.4

million that some percentage might have some residual effect that they don't resolve 100%

that there is some down the road problem because of that something unknown I would say that

that is very likely so this makes it a judgment call right if you're a high-risk group then

that might be a good idea but maybe it's not such a good idea across-the-board another

difference we want to be aware of is the way that the body is exposed to the virus which

is the vector of Entry that normally if you breathe it in or you'll get it on your skin

or you eat it or something then it's going to encounter the virus the pathogen is going

to encounter and immune barrier it's going to encounter skin or mucous membrane or intestinal

lining and in the gut it's going to come across GALT and GALT stands for Gut Associated Lymphoid Tissue

you have the majority of your immune cells in the gut that's where most of them

live because then they can sit there and they can sample and they can make him fight off

the pathogens right as they're coming in but also they can sample and they can get a taste

for them they can get an idea what they're dealing with and then your immune system goes

to work on building up a defense against it that's a really important part of building a

strong immune system is to expose your GALT Expose your lymphoid tissue to these pathogens

and in a vaccination you inject it and you bypass all of that so yes it's a weakened pathogen

that they're injecting, but your body doesn't have the same opportunity to prepare and deal and adapt to it

And in my opinion this is personal opinion

I think that there is probably a little bit lesser immunity I don't think it's as complete

and solid as if you get exposed to it sort of the natural way we have to keep in mind

that no matter what the situation the people who are most vulnerable their high

risk because of something pre-existing so they might have asthma COPD cystic fibrosis

neurological disorders heart disease diabetes obesity and unfortunately this is not reserved

for the elderly population even though in the coronavirus situation it's affecting mostly

elderly but overall and in flu all of these are strong risk factors for kids as well and

we're seeing more and more of these in very young people unfortunately I'm not categorically

for or against vaccines I think the smallpox vaccine I think it was great that we could

use that and eliminate smallpox but the widespread use of vaccines I think is a little overdone

sometimes I think there's a judgment call and I think it's there's a time and a place

for it So remember that you can get vaccinated and you can still get the flu in the case

of the coronavirus you could have immunity and because it's a contact transmission as

well as a droplet you could shake the hand of someone who's infected and it doesn't affect

you and you can't get it but you can still pass it on to somebody else now let's say

hypothetically that a coronavirus vaccine becomes available and it can reduce the risk

of death by 50% should you take it Well I think it's a lot of individual choice and

weighing pros and cons here if you're over 85 years old then reducing the risk by half

could be half of a 15% risk of death I think that's pretty substantial so I think there's

an argument for it in that case if you are under 50 and you have no pre-existing condition

you eat real food and you don't have insulin resistance then the risk of death might be

0.2% or even a lot less so cutting that in half may not be as valuable may not be as

big a deal personally I haven't had anything more than a very slight sniffle in many many

years I can't even think back far enough that I would have had symptoms such as a flu so

I'm not even sure if I've ever had one I'm guessing that I probably did growing Up

a few decades ago but I'm not sure so if a coronavirus vaccine becomes available I would

probably think long and hard about it and and give it some serious thought but here's

perhaps the primary and strongest argument for a widespread vaccination if it becomes

available and that's the impact of vaccinations on the R naught or the reproductive Factor as

you recall it depends on three different factors which is the how strong the pathogen is how

many contacts a day we make and how long it takes so a vaccine could affect the number

of contacts because if more people are immune then there's fewer people to give it

and there's fewer people to get it so if a vaccine would have an efficiency of 40 or 50 or 60% then

it could reduce the R naught by that amount and that could be very substantial however

this is assuming that by the time we get to a functional and safe vaccine that we still

haven't accomplished any natural herd immunity if our immunity is zero then this would make

a lot of sense however if we have already reached a 60 or 70% herd immunity then I would

say the vaccine would be primarily for the high-risk groups let's talk about Sweden and

how they've dealt with it I have a particular interest in Sweden because I'm Swedish it's

my first language all my family still lives there including my parents so I want to know

what's happening over there and I've been digging through their government sites and all the public information

and all the Swedish media and I've

gotten a pretty good idea first of all Sweden has been called unrestricted we get this impression

that Oh well they're just doing whatever they want to over there which is far from

the truth Sweden had the same goal as everyone else which is to control the speed of the

spread to not have a growth curve that they couldn't deal with that would overwhelm the

healthcare system and so far it's been working very well they have stressed the Healthcare

System just like most countries but they have not been anywhere near of maximizing or overloading

it and that's been the primary concern like I said they just felt like they could meet

that goal without having a mandatory lockdown what they have done is a encourage social

distancing just like everybody else they encourage telecommuting and the main difference from

other countries is they've kept the schools open and we'll come back to that and why that's

not such a bad idea They have limited crowds to 50. They've kept the restaurants open but restaurants

who fail to meet the recommendations with the guidelines who crowd people too much they

get closed down Sweden has made it very easy for people to stay home if they feel even

a hint of a sniffle or a sore throat normally if people get sick for a week then they don't

get paid for the first day that they're gone but then they get paid for the rest of the

week but as soon as the corona hit then they did the way with what they call the Karensdag

which is a qualifying day so now people can stay home and not lose any pay they don't

have that qualifying day at all I think maybe in my opinion that Sweden was a little more

realistic at the outset on how long this thing was going to be around I think a lot of people

thought lot of countries thought they say just shut down for a couple of weeks then they'd

be fine but Sweden was looking for a sustainable solution they knew that this was going to

be around for six months so if you can't do it for 6 months then you're going to have

to break those principles at some point so a lot of harsh opinions have been voiced about

how Sweden is paying a big price they're paying a hard price the're gambling with people's

lives but we'll look at some numbers and my impression is that I think everyone is going

to pay a high price but maybe it's just a question of when we're paying it now or later

there's a graph of the new cases in Sweden from March 22nd through May 11th so just under

two months and the blue bars are the new cases per day and the red line is a rolling 7-Day

average kind of smooth out and give you an idea of the trend and as you can see it grew

and the beginning of March like most countries and then it sort of leveled off and then it

looks like it has a tendency to go down a little bit when we look at the death cases

and Sweden then it's the same basic shape of the graph but maybe we're seeing even more

so a little bit stronger downtrend so it doesn't look like they're paying a tremendous price

or that it's completely out of control if we compare Sweden to the United States then

of course the scale is going to be very different because of the population difference but the

shape of the red line is roughly the same we have an upturn and then we've got a plateau

and maybe toward the end we have a slight downtrend same thing with both with cases

new cases and new deaths and if we compare Sweden to the rest of the world then we see

the same thing The Only Exception maybe being that the world is has so many countries at

different stages and some countries are behind so we're still seeing - we're not seeing a downtrend

at all but more so just a steady plateau so does Sweden have a lot of cases not really

when we look at cases per million people per capita by country receive that Sweden certainly is

not the lowest and many countries in the world who are way lower than anyone on this graph

but in the European Community then Sweden's doing fairly well

They're a lot higher than some of their Scandinavian neighbors that they've been compared to

and that's the reason they have gotten a lot of criticism but who do you compare to?

Why would you compare to Norway rather than Netherlands or Belgium they're all similar size countries

and Belgium has about twice the number of cases if we look at deaths by capita or per

million people same thing we compare Norway and Sweden Sweden looks really bad cuz Norway

has done really well but Sweden is right there with the Netherlands and it's less than half

the deaths per population compared to Belgium. So of course none of this is done none of this

is over but it certainly looks like Sweden is not paying a higher price or a significantly

higher price than any comparable country one thing they did learn the hard way unfortunately

is how hard this hit the elderly population so it's not so much about containing the spread

in the general population as it is protecting the elderly and Sweden wasn't fast enough

so this got a foothold in some retirement homes in some elderly people's communities

and before they had a chance to shut it down the damage was already done as a result we

see that 88% of deaths are in people over 70 95% of deaths of people over 60 and 98%

are people over 50 now a lot of the criticism has been on schools they say it's irresponsible

to send your kids to school but there have been no death cases in people under 20 not

a single one and then people say well they go to school and then they spread the virus

around well primarily as long as you keep them away from the elderly as long as you

have a containment and no visitation on the elderly then these kids are primarily going

to see their parents who are going to be mostly in the 30 to 40 to 49 year range and they

are also not affected hardly at all people under 50 or less than 2% of the death cases

so the whole point of this is they've gotten critique for letting people go to parks and

go to school and go to restaurants but what we're seeing is the people who go to school

and who are out they are the people who are not affected so as long as they stay away

from the elderly they're not really affecting the outcome they're not killing people if

anything maybe they're helping produce some immunity so I'm not going to say who is right

I'm not going to say that one way is better than the other but maybe they're just different

ways of handling it however one question that's really important is if it's not going away

if it's going to be with us then we put in some restrictive measures the question is

are we going to be able to keep it up for months or years are we going to be able to

keep doing what we're doing for 6 months for 12 months for 18 months probably not the US

is already seeing the highest unemployment and the highest financial strain since the great

depression a hundred years ago to the answer to this question can you keep it up for months

and years in Sweden the answer is probably yes they found a way and I'm not saying that's

for everybody but they were able to do that for their societal structure and their level

of personal responsibility and so forth it seems to be working could other countries

say yes to that question I think that's very questionable I don't think most countries

can keep it up vast majority of information in the news media has been on reporting the

number of cases and how to wash your hands and how to protect yourself and that's because

first of all the media their job is to scare people that's to get attention but more so

it's because the government is sending out the information to government is producing

this is the source of this information the government's goal is not necessarily the same

as yours they go hand-in-hand but the government needs to keep the spread down it needs to

avoid overloading the Healthcare System the crisis system right and you're part of that

but as an individual your priorities are different so you basically have two choices

you can wait for a vaccine and hope that it's going to do the trick

or you can change the odds and what do we mean by that

let's talk about the odds if and when the vaccine becomes available hypothetically and

might be reducing the risk of death by 50% might be better might be worse we don't know

who also don't know when and if it'll come and we know that they're rushing it they're

very anxious to get it done in time so we don't know how solid and how reliable and

safe is going to be at that point but it might be able to reduce the risk somewhere in the

50% range we also know that the risk factors for the Coronavirus age is the primary risk

factor but the older people are mostly at risk because they have more diabetes and more degeneration

and more heart disease and more of these pre-existing conditions we know that these risk factors

can increase the risk from very very low probably 0.3 or even less all the way up to 10 or maybe

15% so that's more than a 30 fold increase that there are risk factors the vaccine can

reduce it by 50% the risk factors can increase it by 3000% what if we could change that what

if we could change the odds what if we could reverse some or even most of these 3000% that

would have a far greater impact than a vaccine ever could and this is something that you

have in your hands I've done a lot of videos on the immunity and the coronavirus but

I want to mention one thing about viruses need sugar right they don't metabolize sugar

directly but the virus can't replicate unless it gets into your cell and uses the energy

resources of your cell and the virus is clever enough to manipulate your intra-cellular

messengers so those messenger bring in more glucose to turn into energy that the virus

then uses for replication so the virus tricks you into bringing in more glucose so the

higher your glucose your blood sugar levels the more fuel the more energy is available

for virus replication And if that doesn't make you think twice about sugar I don't know what will

sugar further of course triggers insulin and insulin resistance which is involved in

beyond the risk factors to bring up that 3000% So here is something I've been wondering about

I went to Costco the other day to buy some food and now they're not letting people in

without wearing a face mask they're obviously very concerned with protecting people so they're

wiping down the cart and you have to wear a face mask and they tell people to stay six

feet apart and there's dots on the floor and lines and everything so they're very keen

on protecting you but something that I noticed is that people fill their carts with the same

amount of sugar as ever before maybe more because of all the confinement and the quarantine

they're stressed and they need comfort food they think so they're buying the soda and

the ice cream and the cookies and the donuts and the snacks and the crackers all of these

things that either are sugar or turn into sugar so maybe help me figure this out if

they're so concerned with protecting people how come they're still selling so much of

the stuff that destroy people's health? If you enjoyed this video and you'd like to learn more

about health and how the body really works I think that you really like that video as well

Thank you so much watching I'll see you in the next video