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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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President Trump has long seemed fascinated with the idea that herd immunity could provide an easy end to the coronavirus pandemic, even before his own diagnosis with covid-19 and his blithe declaration after he checked himself out of the hospital that no one should be afraid of getting it. “With time, it goes away,” he told an ABC News town hall last month. “And you’ll develop — you’ll develop herd — like a herd mentality.
It’s going to be — it’s going to be herd-developed, and that’s going to happen. That will all happen.” The neuroradiologist he brought in to advise on the pandemic response over the summer, Scott Atlas, has argued that rising case counts will bring the nation to herd immunity faster.
Now the White House has turned this half-baked idea into an official strategy, calling it “focused protection.” In this approach, the virus would be allowed to spread among young, healthy people with little attempt to slow it down, while officials try to keep older, more vulnerable Americans from contracting it.
In the modern era, herd immunity is best achieved by vaccination, when enough people acquire immunity to an infection through a shot in the arm to protect the whole community. That’s our goal every flu season; it’s the reason we vaccinate infants against dreaded childhood diseases.
But now, the official policy of the Trump administration will be to try to speed up the arrival of herd immunity to the novel coronavirus by letting the virus infect people faster. Without a vaccine, though, this strategy risks the deaths of millions of Americans.
Proponents of herd immunity with “focused protection” generally oppose mask mandates, contact tracing and other measures to slow the spread of the virus because they imagine that infection can be confined to the “low risk” population and want to hasten infection in that group.
After falsely promising that the epidemic would go away “like a miracle” when the weather turned warm, the White House has now found support for its new cold-weather line of wishful thinking in the so-called “Great Barrington Declaration,” a document published last week at a ceremony at a libertarian think tank by three scientists whose views diverge sharply from those of most infectious-disease epidemiologists. On Tuesday night, a White House official speaking on the condition of anonymity told reporters that the plan “is endorsing what the president’s strategy has been for months.”
On the morning of 13 July, more than 20 COVID-19 experts from across the U.S. government assembled in a conference room at the Department of Health and Human Services, steps from the Capitol. The group conferred on how best to gather key data on available beds and supplies of medicine and protective gear from thousands of hospitals. Around the table, masks concealed their expressions, but with COVID-19 cases surging out of control in some parts of the country, their grave mood was unmistakable, say two people who were in the room.
Irum Zaidi, a top aide to White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Deborah Birx, chaired the meeting. Zaidi lifted her mask slightly to be heard and delivered a fait accompli: Birx, who was not present, had pulled the plug on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) system for collecting hospital data and turned much of the responsibility over to a private contractor, Pittsburgh-based TeleTracking Technologies Inc., a hospital data management company. The reason: CDC had not met Birx’s demand that hospitals report 100% of their COVID-19 data every day.
According to two officials in the meeting, one CDC staffer left and immediately began to sob, saying, “I refuse to do this. I cannot work with people like this. It is so toxic.” That person soon resigned from the pandemic data team, sources say.
Other CDC staffers considered the decision arbitrary and destructive. “Anyone who knows the data supply chain in the U.S. knows [getting all the data daily] is impossible” during a pandemic, says one high-level expert at CDC. And they considered Birx’s imperative unnecessary because staffers with decades of experience could confidently estimate missing numbers from partial data.
“Why are they not listening to us?” a CDC official at the meeting recalls thinking. Several CDC staffers predicted the new data system would fail, with ominous implications. “Birx has been on a monthslong rampage against our data,” one texted to a colleague shortly afterward. “Good f---ing luck getting the hospitals to clean up their data and update daily.”
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