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

To be fair, it’s hard to keep track of all these horrific ghouls…

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Nazis wanted to eliminate Polish (and other Slavonic) ethicities too, just on a larger timescale.

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I’ve always had a soft spot for the other sonnet of that pair:

http://www.potw.org/archive/potw192.html

A bit more on the nose perhaps but none the worse for that.

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What, do all rich white men look the same to you or something? Sheesh!

Easy way to tell these two apart: the radiologist is the one with all the hair. (I guess some of those ‘job killing’ regulations might be helpful after all, eh?)

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I think civilization is substantially more resilient than that. Not that it is good, but we managed a world with cholera allowing for reinfection, while we had other horrifying diseases rampaging around like smallpox and all of our fun vaccine preventable childhood illnesses. We would just have to deal with a slow burn perpetual genocide and occasionally abandoning a major city, but civilization writ large would survive.

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Similarly, disgraced, booted out by his own party as an incompetent oaf, and soon to be hired by the English Tory party Tony Abbot who dragged Australia’s name through the mud much as the current poostain in the US is doing sez…

“It’s a bad time for anyone with the virus, but it is also a bad time for people that would rather not be dictated to by officials, however well meaning,” he said in a speech at the Policy Exchange thinktank in London." Well it’s a very bad time to be dictated to by possibly the most opaquely funded “think tank”* in the UK.

  • Predetermined Answer Wank Bank, amirite?
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It’s a refreshing change for a bad idea to go from the UK to the States for once.

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Okay but Ewww! That racist, really? That trick never works. Let the weak die?

500k dead puts us halfway between the US death toll from World War II (405k) and the American Civil War (665k) or about the population of Atlanta, Georgia (37th largest city in the US.)

2 million dead would be like wiping out say Philadelphia and New Orleans (6th and 50th largest), close to 90% of Houston (4th largest), or New Mexico.

2 million is also about a quarter the population of New York City. Say roughly the borough of Manhattan and New York County plus the borough of Staten Island and Richmond County – dead.

According to the CDC we’re already at 182,622 deaths or the population of Fort Lauderdale, Florida (the 142nd largest.)

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Its new virus. Nobody really studied it. Is Mike Lindell his lab assistant?

For an example of what people who have sipped the trump cool aid believe, here is a post from facebook by a florida-man on where he is putting all his eggs:

While reading the Orlando Medical News, I came across this very matter-of-fact, letter to the editor, from an Orlando physician. Please feel free to share if you find it interesting. And, no I don’t regularly read the Orlando Medical News but I stay away and ignore the misleading media and headlines and prefer to do my own digging and research. The virus spread has me reading other sources. The herd immunity threshold (HIT), for this virus is actually lower than other diseases because of the fact that the corona virus is a type of human cold virus, and many people have a measure of T-cells already generated which lesson the symtoms and its affect; explaining why there are so many people with no symtoms at all. Coupled with the lower HIT and very low Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) the math is with us! Florida has become the whipping guy in the news with all the reports of “cases.”
The only way through COVID-19 is by achieving the modest (10-20%) Herd Immunity Threshold required to have the virus snuff itself out. The sooner politicians—and the press—start talking about HIT and stop talking about new confirmed cases, the better off we will all be. Either way, it’s likely weeks, not months, before the data of new daily deaths will be so low that the press will have to find something new to scare everyone. It’s over.

It is rife with factual errors, and the letter referenced here by a florida-man doctor in late June just before cases in Florida went through the roof is still rolled out as justification that “its not so bad, in fact its over”.

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sponge-bob-sarcastic-sb

Ugh… people think they can read texts from highly specialized fields and understand them better than people who have knowledge of that field…

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rationalizing is a high art

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Or the last refuge of scoundrels…?

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Of course, following up on sources is the way some of us try to get some rudimentary working knowledge of fields that aren’t our personal specialties. It works a little bit better than argumentum ad verecundiam.

But stupid people gonna stupid, and people with an axe to grind can always find some source to back them up.

It’s not even about people being stupid… it’s about someone with no expertise taking some form of knowledge that’s highly specialized and thinking they can understand it in the same way that an expert can. There are plenty of fields of knowledge that are accessibly to a generally literate public (my own field (mostly) being an example of that). There are plenty of fields that are pretty opaque and need some translation, even from people who are intelligent.

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No, it’s really not. Read about some of the studies that have been done - they’re absolutely terrifying*. Our civilization is actually pretty brittle compared to pre-industrial societies, requiring maintaining a complex balance to keep going. A sufficient percentage of the population gets sick/dead, production and/or trade is disrupted, everything starts falling apart, billions starve and civilization ends. And we’re not even talking about trying to contain a disease with poor knowledge of how to do so - we’re talking about a strategy of deliberately allowing its spread. Something that didn’t happen, except with smallpox, which you might not be aware was a civilization-ending disease. Plenty of those other “fun vaccine preventable childhood illnesses” ended up being civilization-killers.

And I’m actually being optimistic here - some people have suggested this could be species ending if uncontained.

*e.g. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826501-400-will-a-pandemic-bring-down-civilisation/

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All day every day, more so now…

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Even in his own field, he’s considered a wingnut.

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My strategy has always been to find people smarter than myself discussing the thing, and then, for the most part, shut the hell up and let them do so.

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