Skip to content

Thursday, Jun. 4, 2020

Will everyone on earth need to get a vaccine to halt the spread of the coronavirus?

Anna Lenaker, Gigafact
no

Early estimates suggest at least 70% of the population would need to acquire immunity to stop the spread of the coronavirus, according to infectious disease specialists at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. By the time a vaccine is widely available, some percentage of the population will have acquired at least a degree of immunity through prior exposure to the virus. So some proportion below 70% would need to get a vaccine, depending on how many people have acquired "natural" immunity.

Immunity thresholds vary with the contagiousness of a disease, ranging anywhere from 50% to 90%, according to Hopkins. And some immunity is lifelong, while with other infectious diseases, like the flu, it is only about a year.

"Herd immunity is still a long way away," a Hopkins advisory said on April 30.

Sources

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.

See all fact briefs

Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.

Learn More

Latest Fact Briefs

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.