ArticleJournal of medical ethics2023
Herd immunity, vaccination and moral obligation.
Article in Journal of medical ethics, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Global spatiotemporal analysis in hepatitis B third dose vaccine coverage from 1980-2023 across 204 countries and territories.Human vaccines & immunotherapeutics · 2026Article
- Article
- Influenza vaccine hesitancy versus uptake in seven Chinese megacities: a cross-sectional survey.Infectious diseases of poverty · 2026Article
- Measles: An Updated Literature Review of the Host Response, Pathogenesis, Complications, Prevention Measures, and Recent Outbreaks.Current issues in molecular biology · 2026Review
- Article
- Timeliness of vaccine administration among children in urban informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya.PLOS global public health · 2026Article
- Pandemic paradox: How the COVID-19 crisis transformed vaccine hesitancy into a two-edged sword.Human vaccines & immunotherapeutics · 2025Article
- Article
- Main Husbandry Practices and Health Conditions That Affect Welfare in Calves: A Narrative Review.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Review
- Vaccine-Preventable Diseases in Pediatric Age Group in India: Recent Resurgence, Implications and Solutions.Indian journal of pediatrics · 2025Review
- Article
- [Rapid vaccination monitoring and its impact on vaccination coverage for high-quality catch-up campaigns in the Dominican Republic, 2023Monitoramento das estratégias de vacinação e impacto nas coberturas de vacinação para campanhas de seguimento de alta qualidade na República Dominicana, 2023].Revista panamericana de salud publica = Pan American journal of public health · 2024Article
- Exploring pathogen population density as a metric for understanding post-COVID infectious disease surges.Frontiers in immunology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The public health benefits of herd immunity are often used as the justification for coercive vaccine policies. Yet, 'herd immunity' as a term has multiple referents, which can result in ambiguity, including regarding its role in ethical arguments. The term 'herd immunity' can refer to (1) the herd immunity threshold, at which models predict the decline of an epidemic; (2) the percentage of a population with immunity, whether it exceeds a given threshold or not; and/or (3) the indirect benefit afforded by collective immunity to those who are less immune. Moreover, the accumulation of immune individuals in a population can lead to two different outcomes: elimination (for measles, smallpox, etc) or endemic equilibrium (for COVID-19, influenza, etc). We argue that the strength of a moral obligation for individuals to contribute to herd immunity through vaccination, and by extension the acceptability of coercion, will depend on how 'herd immunity' is interpreted as well as facts about a given disease or vaccine. Among other things, not all uses of 'herd immunity' are equally valid for all pathogens. The optimal conditions for herd immunity threshold effects, as illustrated by measles, notably do not apply to the many pathogens for which reinfections are ubiquitous (due to waning immunity and/or antigenic variation). For such pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, mass vaccination can only be expected to delay rather than prevent new infections, in which case the obligation to contribute to herd immunity is much weaker, and coercive policies less justifiable.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.