Trump's new pandemic boss Scott Atlas pushes ‘herd immunity’ plan, 2 million+ Americans would have to die

Just like how it doesn’t count as murder if you close your eyes when you fire into the crowd.

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They aren’t imagining anything like January. They are assuming a consistant 500-1500 per day death rate, as Trump said he could accept. They aren’t considering seasons, though.

That’s the problem. It’s sadly funny that they are the ones that said summer would slow the virus. It didn’t, but people’s summer behaviors tend to. They aren’t, however, remembering that summer is almost over, and those behaviors will change back into being enclosed with others for long periods.

Mr Atlas my be backpeddling hard by about December.

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Herd immunity is a legit medical concept. In terms of public health it’s almost exclusively talked about in context of vaccines. Basically the minimum vaccination rate needed to ensure those who can’t be or haven’t been vaccinated yet are still protected from infection.

The anti-vax crowd have been heavily criticized for undermining herd immunity when it comes to dangerous diseases. So in attempting to legitimize themselves, and make what they’re doing sound scientific. They adopted the concept and used it to justify and promote the idea of deliberately infecting their kids with shit. The classic “pox party”. Arguing “natural”, immunity is better than that provided by vaccines, and citing unrealistically low numbers for herd immunity (like 65%, the lowest legit number I’ve heard is 85%).

So it’s not just spin with some sinister undertones. It’s the wholesale adoption of quack medicine as public health policy.

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That’s good, upstanding, open-casket patriot thinking. Stay loyal citizen!

Yeah, about that.

The current death rate seems to be higher:

…but whatever it is now that is with full medical support (or at least I don’t recall any stories about hospitals running out of beds…many about how they had to convert other wards, or get creative), and none about being so busy nobody can treat you.

Without medical support way more people will die (my previous estimates are about 18%, but those were total guesses; my current guess would be “almost everyone that would normally need to go to the hospital, but can’t because it is full”).

If you “want” around 240 million people to get it, you either have to be very patient, or well, full tilt infection, which means hospitals will be overrun very very quickly. I think 2.13 million deaths would be a low figure here. More like 20mil to 40mil (either not an entire Texas of dead, or California plus some of those smaller states).

Obviously this isn’t really a useful forum to argue against a mass death policy since I doubt anyone will seriously take up the pro-death side, but well, I already feel like changing my mind about being out of bed today, so I’m not sloshing into mass of pro-deathers to try to talk sense into anyone.

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Yes, and that is still only buffer. Many millions can still be sickened or die, the assumption is just we have enough people vaccinated to prevent the easy spread to these people. Given that, and time, it’s possible to achieve something that looks like herd immunity, but it is not “immunity.” It’s completely a misnomer.

We’ve never achieved what Atlas and the anti-vaxxers are suggesting, with any disease, at all, ever, of any kind. If smallpox got loose somewhere today, we’d quickly see what kind of “herd immunity” we have.
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I referred to this elsewhere as by-catch or collateral damage. When the healthcare system collapses is when truly horrific numbers come into play. We came perilously close during the NYC crisis, and averted it only by employing strategies that are apparently no longer on the table. States that have pushed school reopening are performing a pretty dreadful experiment in real life, and gambling with lives not their own. Future historians are going to have words for us that I suspect we will not enjoy.

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In this metaphor, the crash is due to pilot error, but the investigators all really like that pilot, even though he’s a massive fuck-up, because he’s got great connections, just the best, everyone says so.

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This is fucked up beyond belief. We now have multiple cases of proven reinfection (including at least one case where the second infection was much worse than the first), and no idea how rare this is - which means we have no idea if getting infected provides anyone with immunity. Researchers are now questioning whether herd immunity is even possible, especially through infections. What an utterly insane thing to propose, given what we now know.

I’m guessing “herd immunity” isn’t actually the Republican strategy, it’s this:
https://twitter.com/smotus/status/1300136730998091776

It is, because right now there are questions about whether herd immunity is even possible.

Yeah, and these fake statistics are actually much worse than that. Apparently this deliberate misreading of the statistics is based on those death certificates that only, lazily, have “covid-19” as cause of death - those that do not specify the actual cause of death, e.g. (covid-19-caused) “heart failure” or “lung failure” etc. So it’s not even remotely based on anything real.

In this particular case, it’s stupider than that. They would have looked at the medical examiner reports and said, “Look, the causes of death are all things like ‘blunt force trauma’ and ‘laceration’ - none of them say ‘plane crash’! Obviously no one died of the crash!”

I don’t think so. Even in not having a plan, their (ostensible) goal was to decrease infections. Now, the actual plan is to increase them. It wasn’t easy, but they actually managed to make things worse. I’m kind of impressed.

I feel like, given vaccines aren’t part of this, that we should really stop calling this “herd immunity” but “letting people get sick.” Especially given the high rate of organ damage in those who live.

Yeah, it’s “enough people already got it that it can’t easily spread, now.” And with the new evidence of re-infections, raising questions about whether that’s even possible, well…

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You’re misunderstanding the concept. It isn’t that it creates immunity in individuals. It’s that it collectively insulates a population from reinfection. Depending on the disease 90+% vaccination rates leave too few individuals vulnerable to infection for the disease in question to take hold and spread.

It is the collective “immunity” of a population.

Because what they’re suggesting is nonsense.

This kind of collective insulation from a disease does not, and largely can not come about from infection with the disease. And attempting to do it as a strategy is massively, massively unethical. Completely discarding the base point of medicine. You’d need nearly the entire population to be infected simultaneously, at a death rate that’s currently at 5% ish in the US.

And you’d have to do that continually till the disease peters out on it’s own. And hope it doesn’t mutate.

It’s also reliant on the sort of long term, reliable immunity that infection with many diseases does not provide, and mutations of said disease can’t get around. The kind of immunity we get from certain vaccines.

We’ve never achieved what they’re suggesting because what they’re suggesting isn’t at all how it works.

To the extent that that take on the subject is valid at all. It’s in epidemiology for shit like “why did this massive historical epidemic end on it’s own despite the lack of modern medicine”.

Smallpox is eradicated from the wild. As is rinderpest, a cattle disease. A core part of how we achieved that was herd immunity. These diseases ceased to be endemic in any area of the world in part because the unvaccinated population in areas where it was. Was too small for the disease to continue spreading through these areas, couldn’t get at the unvaccinated.

If smallpox got out in any area we could 1 quarantine the area, 2 reinstitute broad vaccination at rates that insulate those who can not be vaccinated. And it would be gone again.

No one talks about herd immunity to Smallpox. Because there isn’t enough Smallpox in the world for us to even vaccinate broadly anymore.

We are rediculously close to eradicating polio globally, and it has been eradicated for the most part from Europe and the US. Despite the fact that when it was straight up epidemic here, not everyone was vaccinated. Because herd immunity insulated the unvaccinated from the disease, preventing it from establishing itself in the overall population.

We have, and continue to achieve real herd immunity on all sorts of diseases. This is why when measles, formerlly eradicated from the US, began to pop up again. It did not rocket across the country through immuno compromised people and folks for whom immunity faded or the vaccine failed.

While anti-vaxers undermine herd immunity in specific populations, allowing the disease to take hold there. The next one over, there aren’t enough unprotected people for it to do the Covid globally or even nation wide.

Even the anti-vaxers and the knob in the article aren’t arguing herd immunity conveys literal immunity to individuals.

The base concept is what level of immunity, usually from vaccination, you need to prevent a disease from living in a population. Because practically you can not vaccinate 100%.

They’ve just twisted it to argue it can be done by letting a disease live in a population.

See the rest of my comment. It’s not.

You can’t insulate vulnerable individuals in a population from a disease by giving everyone the disease.

It’s like “intelligent design”. Taking some crazy and making it sound like science by cribbing terminology without understanding it or reference to it’s actual meaning.

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The original estimate for how bad this will get is still 500k. Which is a lot, but what I expected to shake out in the end.

2 million? If true, that is catastrophic. They think snuffing out 2 million won’t hurt the economy?

Fuck this idiot.

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Also, the idea of protecting people in nursing homes is ridiculous. They don’t live in a bubble.

I game with a lady who works in a retirement village. She has a life. Other people who work there have lives and kids. Even if they are super cautious (like we haven’t gamed in months), it just takes one getting it to have it spread to a dozen or more elderly.

Unless the care givers quarantine with the people they take care of - like live with them - there is a direct vector for infection. Fucking idiots.

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I’m not so sure of that. At least I don’t think it’s a given. I’d argue their goal was to minimize reported infections, and hope that actual infections went away on their own.

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I had to get all the way to @Shuck ‘s post to find any mention of this, so I want to restate the buried lede here.

Current scientific evidence indicates herd immunity is not possible for COVID-19 because the immune response does not persist. Regardless of whether herd immunity is good policy, YOU CAN’T ACHIEVE IT WITH COVID.

People get sick, they may recover, then they’ll get sick again. There are different types of immune responses, and COVID is not the kind that persists for life, like we normally think about for viral diseases. Some evidence is showing the immune response may be as short as a month. We will likely all be getting (very) regular vaccines for this from now on in order to really control it.

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This. It occurred to me the other day, perhaps a lot later than everyone else, that when Republicans warn us about how bad socialized services would be (or are) what they’re actually telling us is what they plan to do to them if they are ever implemented. I mean, it’s just the subjunctive version of fucking with public school budgets then pointing to the “failure” of public schools.

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I’d like to reiterate that what they’re talking about isn’t really herd immunity to begin with. Not by any definition of the concept.

What they’re talking about isn’t generally possible. Even if COVID immunity was persistent. It’s a wildly impractical way to protect anyone from anything.

This doesn’t happen even when those who recover are immune long term. Otherwise we wouldn’t have needed vaccines for smallpox after centuries of large scale outbreaks.

If diseases just self limited this way the flu would have ceased to exist like a century ago.

To do this as a plan would require deliberately infecting every infant born for several generations.

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With 2 million+ possible deaths, compared to other genocidal actions, that decision may kill more people than Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge did, and is the same order of magnitude as Holocaust.

Not to minimize the scope of proposed covid deaths, and not to be a pedant, but it needs to be pointed out that 2 million, even with the +, is not on the same order of magnitude as the Holocaust.

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They have no intention of doing so. They just want to talk a good game until after November. With Trump, the check is always in the mail.

It’s no secret what Trump himself is actually interested in. Getting re-elected, yes. That keeps him unanswerable to the law. But dealing with COVID-19 is something he’s never shown the remotest interest in actually doing. This is just another version of “it’ll all disappear,” to spin things out just a little longer.

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Ozymandias

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

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They may be imagining a 500-1500 deaths per day, but they are just as stuck on magic in terms of getting there. Whole States of people in bars with no masks, no distancing, let 'er rip! public health is not going to hold the deaths to a mere thousand a day. Or even an order of magnitude more.

This is what we get from letting people who never paid attention in high school algebra manage a country of 330 million.

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