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

boing
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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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What they do is limit pre-existing conditions and make it almost impossible to have covered benefits, then let economic factors thin things out further.

They really do have this thing figured out to the numbers; prune out the old, weak, sick, compromised, and non-white populations, then deny care to anyone who weakens in the subsequent rounds. You’re left with robust blue collar workers who worship power, and you can tease them with the hope of leveling up for quite some time.

In the meantime (Scott) Atlas Shrugged.

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I didn’t know that non-Jewish victims of Nazism also counted as Holocaust victims. Obviously it’s not the same order of magnitude if counted that way. I’m not questioning that, it should be counted that way, but Holocaust was typically defined as (from Wikipedia):

While the term Holocaust generally refers to the systematic mass murder of the Jewish people in German-occupied Europe,

It’s good to see that definition is changing though to take into account all other groups and ethnicities that were systematically murdered by Nazis.

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But that won’t happen.

What kills the old, weak and marginalized also kills their base and leaves the so-called society we have in ruins.

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Well if we are getting pedantic then “within an order of magnitude” usually means “within a multiple of ten.” So a death toll of 2 million could be said to be within the same order of magnitude as an event that killed over 200,000 people or an event that killed under 20 million people.

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It is common (and lazy) to list cause of death as “cardiopulmonary failure.” In English, this means heart and lungs stopped. This is not a “cause of death,” it is just “death.” This is especially common in home deaths among elderly or poor folks. Does not show up on the statistics as anything, actually, because these are commonly disregarded in collecting those statistics because they are meaningless. The tell tale statistic will excess mortality, and those numbers should be coming soon.

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Yeah, which is why I said “ostensible.” At least when talking about Trump, the idea of “goal” or “plan” probably doesn’t even make sense, especially in this context, of something he refused to think about/acknowledge.

Strictly speaking, we just don’t know if “herd immunity”* is possible. We know that some people are getting re-infected, but we have no idea how common that is. If it’s sufficiently rare, it might not be an issue - but at this point, we have absolutely no idea how rare it is. Though given that lack of knowledge, on top of the death rate, on top of the chronic illnesses caused by covid, it’s totally insane to even be talking about this kind of approach, as it’s potentially apocalyptic.

*Or rather, the not-herd-immunity caused by some percentage of the population getting infected. Though this also raises questions about the effectiveness of (actual) herd immunity through vaccines too, though that’s something of a separate issue, apparently.

Right - my comment was just that we really need another name for this not-herd-immunity, to avoid confusing it with actual herd immunity through vaccines.

As a strategy, not-herd-immunity only makes any sense if you assume a) you can’t stop it from eventually spreading throughout the population, and b) you can isolate the most vulnerable populations so that they’re actually protected until the least likely to be killed get infected and prevent further spread, and c) mass re-infection isn’t possible. The problem is: most developed nations have managed a, the US has totally and completely failed at b (along with every other country that tried the not-herd-immunity strategy), and we have no idea about c. So it’s a non-starter, even before we start considering that survivors are likely to have chronic health problems as a result of infection.

But the thing is, if mass-reinfection really is possible, not-herd-immunity not only isn’t a viable strategy for ending the pandemic, it is a viable strategy for ending the civilization. To have a disease like this, that you’re at constant risk of contracting (because little effort has been made to manage it), where every time you get infected it has a risk of death (however small) and a high risk of chronic health issues and/or a hospital stay, your society falls apart pretty darn quick.

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Party of “pro-life” my ass.

This really is a fucking death cult they are running.

Welcome to 21st century America- we have bred the perfect monsters, and they walk among us.

Edit- this thread is completely inaccessible from the main page, link to bbs is broken for me. Has to go into bbs from another thread to even get here.

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Well sure, but this plan was never foolproof to begin with; it was made by fools.

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Yeah, no kidding.

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