The WHO redefinition part looked weird to me, so I tried to verify it. The 13 November text verifies at the Internet Archive—though note that the text shown in the screenshot is only the beginning of the entry. The entry contained many more paragraphs of text, but I don’t see it correcting the weird definition of “herd immunity” that it establishes at the beginning.
However, the current text as I am seeing it live on 31 December (last update today, apparently) is significantly different; it gives a lot of space to the benefits of vaccination, but does not phrase it in such a way as to ignore other immunity sources the way the 13 November text did, and makes it clearer that the “herd immunity through vaccination” is a normative claim on actions that should be taken and not a positive or nominative claim on what herd immunity actually is. Here’s the current first paragraph, emphasis mine:
‘Herd immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection. WHO supports achieving ‘herd immunity’ through vaccination, not by allowing a disease to spread through any segment of the population, as this would result in unnecessary cases and deaths.
The rest of the new text more or less matches this change from the 13 November version; there is a bit about “The fraction of the population that must be vaccinated against COVID-19 to begin inducing herd immunity is not known”, but that’s several paragraphs in and I read it as pretty well-contextualized to “given that the plan is to vaccinate until we reach that point”. Here’s the first sentence from the third paragraph, emphasis mine:
Vaccines train our immune systems to create proteins that fight disease, known as ‘antibodies’, just as would happen when we are exposed to a disease but – crucially – vaccines work without making us sick.
The part I emphasized in that sentence is actually identical in the 13 November text, but badly contextualized. (The other differences in the third paragraph are immaterial to the distinction under question, consisting only of additional explanatory text—I assume to help readers who don’t have a basic gears-model of immune response and viral transmission readily in memory.)
Importantly, and to restate something from above, the third and all subsequent paragraphs are missing from the right-hand screenshot in the post, and it doesn’t look like normal truncation at a glance—the whitespace at the bottom of the screenshot visually implies that the second paragraph was the end of the entry in that version, which is false.
IA snapshots show that the 13 November text was in place up through 27 December, so perhaps not a small blip in terms of Internet time, but it does seem to have been corrected.
I was not able to verify the 9 June text, since IA shows no snapshots of this URL before October. I imagine perhaps the URL was different, and I would appreciate a hard reference if anyone has one.
The WHO redefinition part looked weird to me, so I tried to verify it. The 13 November text verifies at the Internet Archive—though note that the text shown in the screenshot is only the beginning of the entry. The entry contained many more paragraphs of text, but I don’t see it correcting the weird definition of “herd immunity” that it establishes at the beginning.
However, the current text as I am seeing it live on 31 December (last update today, apparently) is significantly different; it gives a lot of space to the benefits of vaccination, but does not phrase it in such a way as to ignore other immunity sources the way the 13 November text did, and makes it clearer that the “herd immunity through vaccination” is a normative claim on actions that should be taken and not a positive or nominative claim on what herd immunity actually is. Here’s the current first paragraph, emphasis mine:
The rest of the new text more or less matches this change from the 13 November version; there is a bit about “The fraction of the population that must be vaccinated against COVID-19 to begin inducing herd immunity is not known”, but that’s several paragraphs in and I read it as pretty well-contextualized to “given that the plan is to vaccinate until we reach that point”. Here’s the first sentence from the third paragraph, emphasis mine:
The part I emphasized in that sentence is actually identical in the 13 November text, but badly contextualized. (The other differences in the third paragraph are immaterial to the distinction under question, consisting only of additional explanatory text—I assume to help readers who don’t have a basic gears-model of immune response and viral transmission readily in memory.)
Importantly, and to restate something from above, the third and all subsequent paragraphs are missing from the right-hand screenshot in the post, and it doesn’t look like normal truncation at a glance—the whitespace at the bottom of the screenshot visually implies that the second paragraph was the end of the entry in that version, which is false.
IA snapshots show that the 13 November text was in place up through 27 December, so perhaps not a small blip in terms of Internet time, but it does seem to have been corrected.
I was not able to verify the 9 June text, since IA shows no snapshots of this URL before October. I imagine perhaps the URL was different, and I would appreciate a hard reference if anyone has one.