Trump Adviser's Plan: Maybe 2 Million Deaths Could Result From Pursuing Coronavirus Herd Immunity Strategy He Is Championing
September 1, 2020
White House Press Conference (The White House)
By Christopher Reeves
The coronavirus has created a permanent change for the United States. 2020 will never be repeated, and young students can never replay their grade school, middle school, or high school years. Graduations were lost. Businesses and communities suffered. Now President Donald Trump has a new plan, along with a new Fox News-approved adviser in Scott Atlas. The new plan: herd immunity. What kind of cost would this plan mean for the United States? Oh, somewhere around 2 million dead.
Atlas, a radiologist, is not in any way an immunologist. He is not someone who is specifically trained in the management of transmittable diseases or the treatment of diseases. Forbes pointed out that the strategy, used in Sweden, isn’t exactly a success:
Most experts estimate between 40% to 80% of the population would need to be infected. However, as James Hamblin reports in The Atlantic, “the effects of the coronavirus are not linear. The virus affects individuals and populations in very different ways.”
“People are exposed to different amounts of the virus, in different contexts, via different routes. A virus that is new to the species creates more variety in immune responses,” he wrote.
Sweden, which has roughly the same population as the state of Michigan, tried to achieve a goal that leaders acknowledged was difficult, and suffered losses. Now, Trump seeks to hit this number nationally, and damned be the fact that American lives will be sacrificed and American families will pay the financial price.
Still, worrying about financial cost to the middle and lower class and working women with children isn’t a big priority for the Trump administration or the new advisers, who lobbied against Obamacare and women’s rights in Forbes.
attribution: Forbes Magazine
Well, I guess his next job is to ask everyone to go out and get infected. That seems ... bad.
Posted with permission