NOW YOU CAN REQUEST VACCINATED DRIVERS

Vaccines work by training and preparing the body’s natural defences – the immune system – to recognize and fight off viruses and bacteria. If the body is exposed to those disease-causing pathogens later, it will be ready to destroy them quickly – which prevents illness. 

When a person gets vaccinated against a disease, their risk of infection is also reduced – so they’re also less likely to transmit the virus or bacteria to others. As more people in a community get vaccinated, fewer people remain vulnerable, and there is less possibility for an infected person to pass the pathogen on to another person. Lowering the possibility for a pathogen to circulate in the community protects those who cannot be vaccinated (due to health conditions, like allergies, or their age) from the disease targeted by the vaccine.

'Herd immunity', also known as 'population immunity', is the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when immunity develops in a population either through vaccination or through previous infection. Herd immunity does not mean unvaccinated or individuals who have not previously been infected are themselves immune. Instead, herd immunity exists when individuals who are not immune, but live in a community with a high proportion of immunity, have a reduced risk of disease as compared to non-immune individuals living in a community with a small proportion of immunity. 

In communities with high immunity, the non-immune people have a lower risk of disease than they otherwise would, but their reduced risk results from the immunity of people in the community in which they are living (i.e. herd immunity) not because they are personally immune. Even after herd immunity is first reached and a reduced risk of disease among unimmunized people is observed, this risk will keep falling if vaccination coverage continues to increase. When vaccine coverage is very high, the risk of disease among those who are non-immune can become similar to those who are truly immune.

WHO supports achieving 'herd immunity' through vaccination, not by allowing a disease to spread through a population, as this would result in unnecessary cases and deaths. 

For COVID-19, a new disease causing a global pandemic, many vaccines are in development and some are in the early phase of rollout, having demonstrated safety and efficacy against disease. The proportion of the population that must be vaccinated against COVID-19 to begin inducing herd immunity is not known.  This is an important area of research and will likely vary according to the community, the vaccine, the populations prioritized for vaccination, and other factors. 

Herd immunity is an important attribute of vaccines against polio, rotavirus, pneumococcus, Haemophilus influenzae type B, yellow fever, meningococcus and numerous other vaccine preventable diseases. Yet it is an approach that only works for vaccine-preventable diseases with an element of person-to-person spread. For example, tetanus is caught from bacteria in the environment, not from other people, so those who are unimmunized are not protected from the disease even if most of the rest of the community is vaccinated.