Clinical nurse has a blood sample taken by a clinical staff member at Sir Charles Gairdner hospital on April 20, 2020 in Perth, Australia. “I will now consider the community, or the herd,” Dudley wrote in 1929. “Nations may be divided into urban or rural herds. Or we can contrast the shoregoing herd with the sailor herd, or herds dwelling in hospitals can be compared with those who live in mental hospitals.” By the 1930s, the idea of herd immunity was considered as a way to handle influenza, polio, smallpox and typhoid, among other diseases, but thinking began to shift in the 1950s when vaccines became available. Most recently, commentators in Lancet have argued that, considering the fact that COVID-19 antibodies might not actually provide protection from the virus, “any proposed approach to achieve herd immunity through natural infection is not only highly unethical, but also unachievable.”