Trump's Shift Toward Herd Immunity Is Not a Strategy

Donald Trump is desperate to convince the public that the Covid-19 pandemic is waning so that the economy can full reopen and, in Trump's mind, spare him from defeat in November.  Trump, who has flirted with numerous insane approaches since February - taking a malaria drug, taking disinfectants, ending testing so that the number of confirmed cases would drop - is now flirting with the idea of allowing the virus to run through the American population until so-called herd immunity is achieved. The cost of doing this in terms of lost lives could be staggering (not that Trump cares) and ignores the reality that even Sweden which flirted with such an approach ended that effort and even now has in place the types of restrictions Trump seemingly wants to end.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this dangerous and desperate practice that the Trump/Pence regime seems to want to pursue.  If you care about your own life and that of your loved ones, vote Trump out of office in November.  Here are article excerpts:

One of the pandemic’s most insidious misconceptions is getting closer to explicit national policy. On Monday, The Washington Post reported that a top Trump medical adviser, Scott Atlas, has been “urging the White House to embrace a controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy.” Atlas subsequently denied the report, though during his time as a Fox News commentator he consistently argued in favor of fringe approaches that go hand in hand with the idea: namely that city and state shutdowns are deadlier than the coronavirus itself.

The idea of abandoning preventive measures and letting the virus infect people has already gotten traction in the administration. Just last week, Atlas moved to ease up on the most important strategy to fight the virus—widespread testing—by telling the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change their guidelines to advise against testing asymptomatic people.

But “herd-immunity strategy” is a contradiction in terms, in that herd immunity is the absence of a strategy. Herd immunity is an important public-health concept, developed and used to guide vaccination policy. It involves a calculation of the percentage of people in a population who would need to achieve immunity in order to prevent an outbreak. The same concept offers little such guidance during an ongoing pandemic without a vaccine. If it were a military strategy, it would mean letting the enemy tear through you until they stop because there’s no one left to attack.

We may hear even more talk of herd immunity as the election nears, since Trump has an incentive to claim that the pandemic is almost over even if it’s not. So now is a good time to revisit exactly what herd immunity means and, perhaps more important, what it doesn’t. I talked with Howard Forman, a health-policy professor at Yale University who has followed the data on how “herd-immunity strategies” have gone in various countries.

In a situation like this where we’ve already lost 180,000 lives, we shouldn’t be flippant about things. We should be thinking about how to avoid as much death as possible, and resume life as well as possible.

Whenever people talk about herd immunity, whenever they talk about ‘ripping the Band-Aid off’ or any of those things, it is an absolutely dangerous idea. Now, I think there are lessons to be learned from Sweden, and no one should be flippant about saying Sweden was horrific or the worst thing that could have happened. But Sweden ultimately did not pursue the policy that we seem to be pursuing right now.

It started off with Sweden and the United Kingdom talking about pursuing herd immunity. Then England got cold feet and Sweden supposedly proceeded with this, but they didn’t. Sweden did a lot of things to curtail the spread. What people seem to not understand is that we do things in our country, even in some areas that are “still shut down” that would not be tolerated in Sweden. They still have a ban on gatherings of 50 people or more.

For the most part, they are without masks. But they still have a complete ban on visiting retirement homes. They still have a ban on public gatherings of 50 people. Gatherings for religious practice? Banned. Theatrical and cinema performances? Banned. Concerts? Banned. And this is what bothers me. [Trump] Our president did a rally in Tulsa. That would have been banned in Sweden.

And we should mention, just always keeping in mind that herd immunity, while maybe a relief now, would have come at the cost of many lives.

[W]e have no idea what the long-term effects [of having Covid-19] will turn out to be and so we don't want to mess around with infecting anyone who doesn’t need to be infected.

We know how much testing alone could do to help us here. Combine massive testing with things like masking and social distancing, and then you have to ask yourself: Why would you allow people to just die in such large numbers when you have these alternatives that are readily available to us? And that, quite frankly, could allow us to get much closer to a normal life than we are right now.

I’m hoping, by the end of November, the entrepreneurs who have been developing these cheap tests are going to allow us to test at such a massive scale at such a low cost that we’ll be able to substantially impact this in a way that we haven’t so far. But I’m also 100 percent convinced that if our federal government had thought about this back in February and March and decided that they were going to commit even one tenth of the amount of money that they have committed to a vaccine to a cheap testing initiative, that we would have already saved tens of thousands of lives and certainly would have saved tens of thousands more going forward.

Now we’re talking about $1 to $5 for these tests. This is the way out until we have a vaccine.