Imagined Immunities: A History of Our Collective Resistance to Disease

During the COVID-19 pandemic no scientific concept has been more contested in the Anglophone world than "herd immunity." While some scientists considered herd immunity to be the inevitable endpoint of the pandemic, with or without a vaccine, others believed it should have a more restricted meaning as an elimination threshold attained exclusively through mass vaccination. Was herd immunity something that would happen after most of us were infected, or did it mean that most of us would never become infected? Does herd immunity denote the widespread immunity acquired from infection that pushes a virus to become endemic, or is it the opposite: the elimination of a pathogen from a population via mass vaccination?This project seeks to clarify this scientific dispute by understanding the historical origins and development of the idea that populations can become "immune," a term ordinarily reserved for individuals. Imagined Immunities: A History of Our Collective Resistance to Disease proposes that the origins of today's disputes reside in the deep history of a term which has developed a conflicting set of scientific uses and meanings over the course of a century. Analyzing the history of scientific efforts to envision human communities as immune and, ultimately, to make them so, Imagined Immunities will make unique contributions to the history of science and medicine while also advancing contemporary scientific and public health discussions.