Vanity Fair: Trump’s New Favorite COVID Adviser Thinks “Herd Immunity” Is a Good Idea

According to Vanity Fair:

Trump’s new pandemic adviser is pushing a “herd immunity” approach to the coronavirus—a stance that has concerned health experts and underscored White House officials’ use of the coronavirus crisis to win political influence. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who was brought on to advise Trump on COVID-19 earlier this month, is spearheading the herd immunity approach, which involves lifting restrictions on social and business interactions to spread the virus through most of the population, protecting the vulnerable while the healthy build up resistance to the disease. 

Atlas “does not have a background in infectious diseases or epidemiology” and was reportedly hired “to argue an alternative point of view” from Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, two central members of the White House coronavirus task force “whom the president has grown increasingly annoyed with for public comments that he believes contradict his own assertions that the threat of the virus is receding.”

Scientists believe the herd immunity to COVID-19 in the United States will require that 70% of the population of 328 million, or 230 million contract the virus.  This is predicted to result in 2.3 million deaths, 44 million hospitalizations, 41 million people with permanent heart damage, 23 million people with permanent lung damage, 10 million persons with severe neurological damage, and 7 million strokes.

Now, I know there are people who are willing to sacrifice lives for the economy, but think of how the U.S. economy would fare with all those people exiting, some permanently, others temporarily.