Donald
Trump’s Final Pitch to Americans: Drop Dead
The White House has “embraced” a pandemic strategy that could
require 2 million people to die.
BY BESS LEVIN
OCTOBER
14, 2020
With 20 days to go until the presidential election, Donald
Trump’s prospects are not looking great. As of last week, Joe Biden was leading the
president by an average of 9.7 points nationally and five to seven points in
major battleground states. Biden has a much higher favorability rate than Hillary
Clinton did this late in the race. The president is down in Michigan,
Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the states to which he owes his 2016 win. He’s
hemorrhaging support from women (which might have something to do with the fact
that one of his campaign advisers called one of the most prominent women in
America a “power-hungry, smug bitch”). Seniors, who were essential to his
political fortune four years ago, have been souring on him. And on arguably the
biggest issue of the day—COVID-19—two thirds of Americans think Trump has
done a terrible job.
Against this backdrop,
one might think that Trump would spend the next two and a half weeks swearing
to voters that he’s finally taking the pandemic seriously and that he’s got a
plan to tackle this thing, even if it means something like a national mask mandate,
a move that experts say could stop the
virus in its tracks in four to eight weeks. Instead he’s got a slightly
different plan: ignore the whole thing and let nature take its course, i.e.
trust in herd immunity, which could require some 2
million Americans to die. Per the New York Times:
The
White House has embraced a declaration by a group of scientists arguing that
authorities should allow the coronavirus to spread among young healthy people
while protecting the elderly and the vulnerable—an approach that would rely on
arriving at “herd immunity” through infections rather than a vaccine. Many
experts say “herd immunity”—the point at which a disease stops spreading
because nearly everyone in a population has contracted it—is still very
far-off. Leading experts have concluded, using different scientific methods,
that about 85 to 90% of the American population is still
susceptible to the coronavirus.
On a
call convened Monday by the White House, two senior administration officials,
both speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to give their names,
cited an October 4 petition titled The Great Barrington Declaration, which
argues against lockdowns and calls for a reopening of businesses and
schools.... Its lead authors include Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an
epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at Stanford University, the
academic home of Dr. Scott Atlas, President Trump’s science
adviser. Dr. Atlas has also espoused herd immunity. The declaration’s
architects include Sunetra Gupta and Gabriela Gomes, two
scientists who have proposed that societies may achieve herd immunity when 10
to 20% of their populations have been infected with the virus, a position most
epidemiologists disagree with.
“Current lockdown
policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,”
the declaration states, adding, “The most compassionate approach that balances
the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at
minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the
virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at
highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.”
“The idea that herd
immunity will happen at 10 or 20% is just nonsense,” Dr. Christopher
J.L. Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute
for Health Metrics and Evaluation, told the Times. In August
the Washington Post reported that
roughly 65 to 70% of a population would need to be infected to achieve herd
immunity, and with a population of 328 million, the U.S. could need 2.13
million people to die to cross that threshold.
This brilliant idea from
the White House comes on the heels of an outbreak in Trump’s inner circle that
has infected dozens of people so far. On Tuesday night the Department of Labor
said the wife of Secretary Eugene Scalia had tested positive
for the coronavirus, which is not entirely surprising given that she attended
the super-spreader event at the White House to celebrate nominating Amy
Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. On Wednesday, Trump is scheduled to hold a
rally in Iowa, where hospitalizations for the virus have hit a new high. Des
Moines, where the event will take place, has been told to limit gatherings to
25 people on account of being labeled—by the White House!—a “yellow zone” for
transmission of the virus. “If anyone in attendance is infectious, we are
potentially looking at another super-spreader event,” Lina Tucker
Reinders, executive director of the Iowa Public Health
Association, told the Des
Moines Register. “We again today set a record high for
hospitalizations. We need to be focusing on bringing those numbers down and
controlling the spread, not enabling large events, political or otherwise.”
