Herd Immunity

I talked to a senior White House official earlier this evening about all of these people, hundreds of people sitting side by side in the audience, not wearing masks, and the senior White House official brushed off these concerns about the lack of social distancing at the president’s speech. And get this, this quote might blow you away, “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually.” – Jim Acosta, CNN Chief WH Correspondent, link

I would guess the senior White House official is Stephen Miller, who would be a Nazi if only he were not Jewish. In any event, the Trump administration, probably all the way up to Donald Trump himself, subscribes to the eugenic theory of herd immunity, the idea that if one lets a disease run rampant through a population, it will die out and the surviving population will be a stronger one.

But this is fantasy. If it were so, all of the great plagues would have died out centuries ago and there would be no influenza, no measles, mumps, chicken pox, polio, bubonic plague. Over the centuries, Europeans developed limited resistance to all of these. Over the centuries, the surviving pathogens became less deadly to Europeans. But the diseases never died out. When the diseases arrived in the New World they ripped through a population with no immunity. The things that finally killed smallpox and polio were vaccination, quarantine, tracking, tracing – the public health measures that the Trump administration refuses to take against COVID-19.

Nazi Nazi Nazi.