They have graduated from some of the most prestigious universities in the world: Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Oxford. They were received in the highest political councils of the government. They have become staples of television news and have been quoted through some of the country’s leading newspapers.
They are an organization of academics and scientists who have pushed for a discredited solution to the COVID pandemic, avoiding masks, school closures, even vaccines, all in the call to achieve the elusive purpose of “herd immunity,” which would have possibly been a heap of thousands of dead Americans.
That’s the claim of “We Want Them Infected,” a new e-book meticulously researched by Jonathan Howard, a New York University neurologist and veteran of pseudoscience that is polluting our efforts to combat the pandemic.
In 2019, I would have been a charlatan if I had warned that the most productive way to get rid of a virus is to spread it. But it has become habitual and influenced politicians at the highest levels.
Jonathan Howard, MD
Howard takes his name from Paul Alexander, an epidemiologist at the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services.
In July 2020, Alexander laid out his attitude on how to exploit the relative dangers of COVID for discrete populations to achieve herd immunity. The idea was that many other people would end up naturally inflamed with the virus and immune to a new infection, that the virus could not spread further.
“Babies, children, teenagers, youth, young adults, middle-aged people without conditions, etc. have a 0 to low risk,” he told senior HHS officials. be infected. “
Alexander’s proposal was necessarily a diatribe opposing the blockades. This suited the Trump White House, which was looking for tactics around the economic disruption caused by the virus. rage among those seemingly low-risk groups, and they were wrong about clients naturally achieving herd immunity.
“We Want Them Infected” is perhaps the most gruesome and infuriating e-book you read about America’s reaction to the pandemic. It is also a must-read.
The e-book is full of charlatans, charlatans and charlatans, and many with outstanding educational backgrounds, many of whom seem to have been seduced by the embrace of the right-wing echo chamber to announce unproven and refuted policies.
“It’s amazing that while doctors like me were racing to treat COVID patients, begging other people to stay home and be safe,” Howard told me, “there was another organization of doctors opposing us, prominent doctors who didn’t intentionally go so far as to intentionally infect other unvaccinated young people with the promise that herd immunity would come in a few months. “
They have consistently downplayed the severity of the pandemic, but they have rarely, if ever, stated that their positive predictions of illness and death have always been proven wrong.
There are a number of disorders with the theory of herd immunity. The first is that immunity to COVID infection tends to be minimized over time rather than becoming permanent. In addition, infection with one variant of the virus does not necessarily confer immunity to other variants, of which there are many.
Another challenge is that COVID can be a devastating disease for patients of any age. Allowing anyone to become inflamed can expose them to serious health problems.
Moreover, the possibility that COVID could be defeated by the herbal expansion of herd immunity has persuaded many to worry about tried and true countermeasures, including social distancing, masking, or vaccination.
Today, more than 3 years after the first COVID outbreak, the U. S. is growing in the U. S. The U. S. Department of Medicine has yet to achieve herd immunity, though it’s nearing the goal, according to Robert Wachter, chairman of the UC San Francisco Department of Medicine. The trajectory of the disease has been catastrophic: the death toll in the U. S. has risen. UU. es 1. 13 million, many children have died and around 245,000 children have lost one or either parent to COVID. USA. U. S. leads the world in COVID deaths; its mortality rate of 3,478 consistent with millions of inhabitants is worse than that of Britain, Spain, France, the Nordic countries, Canada and Israel.
Some proponents of herd immunity have presented their cheerful predictions in a misguided, even dishonest, attempt to please the American public. Scott Atlas, a senior researcher at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, suggested to HHS officials in March 2020 that they oppose the shutdowns on the grounds that they “incite irrational fear” of the virus, which he said would cause about 10,000 deaths. “The panic will have to stop,” Atlas wrote.
Atlas is temporarily one of Trump’s most level-headed advisers, peddling the theory of herd immunity in the White House despite objections from more experienced advisers like Dr. Anna Brown. Deborah Birx.
Howard is concerned about how the politicization of the pandemic has allowed fringe concepts to seep into public fitness policy.
“In 2019, I would have been a charlatan if I had warned that the most productive way to get rid of a virus is to spread it,” he says. “But it has become habitual and influenced politicians at the highest levels. “
In his book, Howard reserves his greatest contempt for the promoters of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a manifesto for herd immunity published in October 2020 and signed through Stanford epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya; Martin Kulldorff, then of Harvard; and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford. (Later thousands of academics and scientists would upload their signatures. )
The center of the opposition was to the blockades. Their solution was what its drafters called “targeted protection,” which meant allowing “those with the slightest threat of dying to live their lives generally to spread immunity to the virus through an herbal infection, while greater protection those at maximum threat. ” “Basically the elderly.
Seniors living at home, according to the release, deserve to be kept away from other members of the family circle when they meet them outside, and “deserve to be delivered groceries and other essentials in their homes. “
Targeted protection, advocates wrote, would allow the company to gain herd immunity and return to general in three to six months.
As Howard documents, it was little more than a libertarian fantasy. This would possibly not have been surprising, since one of its organizers was an arch-libertarian named Jeffrey Tucker.
To get a sense of Tucker’s worldview, a 2016 article titled “Let Kids Work. “There, he ridiculed the Washington Post for publishing a photo gallery of child laborers from a hundred years ago, adding miners and sweatshop staff as young as 10 years old.
Tucker’s reaction that these young people were “working in the adult world, surrounded by animated things and new technologies. They are in the streets, in the factories, in the mines, with adults and with their peers, learning and doing. Valued for what they do, that is, valued as people. . . Anything else you have to say about it, it’s an exciting life. “
A better life, at least, than “forced to the reserves of an entire decade”, that is, going to school.
The promoters of the declaration, Howard writes, never specified how to achieve their goals. Deliver food and materials to millions of homebound seniors?”
As Howard observes, Bhattacharya is very positive about “creating an evening program to supply new food to tens of millions of seniors for months across the country. “
Similar manual gestures addressed the disruptions of multigenerational households, in which millions of vulnerable older people live. Older members of the family circle, they wrote, “may temporarily live with an older friend or sibling, with whom they can isolate themselves in combination at the height of network transmission. As a last resort, empty hotel rooms can be used only for transient accommodation. “
Of course, hermetically isolating tens of millions of “non-vulnerable” people from tens of millions of vulnerable people in a matter of weeks would be “the greatest logistical challenge humanity has ever undertaken,” Howard observes. targeted coverage for herd immunity has been used over a period of 3 to 6 months, as promised in the Great Barrington Declaration.
What it actually fostered was complacency. His editors, Howard says, were “people who had no real-world duty for many things that made the most unlikely things very easy. and underfunded public health authorities. “
What could be the most inexcusable detail of the herd immunity movement?His implication that young people can be used as shields for the rest of the population. Proponents have opposed vaccinating young people on the grounds that their susceptibility to the virus is minimal. in their case, so they can safely get herbal immunity, and perhaps, as UC San Francisco’s Vinay Prasad suggested, spice up adult immunity in their families.
However, while young people tend to suffer fewer symptoms when infected, they are still immune. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 1600 young Americans under the age of 18 have died from the COVID pandemic.
In any case, death is not the only serious result of COVID. The CDC says more than 14,000 young people have been hospitalized with COVID during the pandemic. Countless young people would possibly suffer from prolonged COVID or other manifestations of the disease in their lives. For doctors, advising intentionally exposing young people to COVID when a vaccine is available, especially if the purpose is to protect adults, is “an ethical abomination,” Howard says. He’s right.
In a science-driven world, proponents of a failed theory of herd immunity have since lost their credibility and public forums.
The opposite has happened. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff still have their platforms (Kulldorff is now related to Hillsdale College on the right). Both were appointed in December by Florida’s anti-vaccine governor, Ron DeSantis, to a “public health integrity committee” charged with federal public health policy.
Meanwhile, Scott Atlas asked to deliver the keynote address at New College of Florida, a once-renowned liberal arts institution that DeSantis has turned into a haven for right-wing pedagogy. graduates, indicating that young Americans may not be fooled as easily as their parents.
Right now, right-wing anti-science ideology is on the rise. The agitation opposing the COVID vaccine is turning into an opposition movement opposing vaccines for all formative years, a trend that threatens to produce an outbreak of other preventable vaccines. diseases such as measles and polio.
“The anti-vaccine motion detected an opportunity to sow doubt,” Howard told me. “Getting rid of all school vaccination mandates has been the holy grail for them. “
Howard’s e-book is a warning. We would possibly be at the breaking point of a public health catastrophe, as the promoters of a failed theory that COVID can also be fought simply through “natural immunity” without vaccines have wrapped themselves in the cloak of truth-tellers. But they are not.
This story made the impression in the Los Angeles Times.
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