Apl. Prof. Dr Andreas Ruppel
Apl. Prof. Dr. Andreas Ruppel introduces a paper from January 2021 on herd immunity and COVID-19 vaccinations in countries with poor populations. Prof. Ruppel co-authored the paper together with four specialists in their home countries (Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, and India). Until his retirement in 2011, Andreas Ruppel was an Außerplanmäßiger Professor at the Heidelberg Institute for Global Health, which is part of the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg and the Heidelberg University Hospital. Since then, he has organized the annual Summer Schools with participants from all over the world. Three of the four co-authors graduated from the Institute of Global Health.
“Current COVID-19 control strategies are based on social distancing, hygiene, contact tracing and expected vaccine(s). However, these are not suitable for poor and marginalized people living in miserable, unhygienic environments. We hypothesize that among such people the virus
will currently spread without restraint and herd immunity may develop before the advent of a vaccine to them. The developments at the beginning of 2021, the second year of the pandemic, unfortunately seem to confirm our hypothesis. Global attention on COVID-19 could be leveraged to create provisions for improving health and hygiene for the poor now in order to address a myriad of serious health issues while at the same time establishing control over the spread of COVID-19.”
