The terrible irresponsibility of “herd immunity” - part I

There has been growing discussion by people, normally thought of as at least somewhat rational, of the idea that the best way to deal with the novel coronavirus is simply to abandon all efforts to control its spread, while taking extra precautions to protect the most vulnerable among us. We had the spectacle a week ago that the DHS Secretary, Alex Azar, essentially endorsed this idea – which of course is very disconcerting news.

The herd immunity argument is based on some big (and very dangerous) assumptions, which I’ll discuss one-by-one in future posts. But in this post I just want to point out the main goal of pushing this idea at this point: it puts a “scientific” veneer on what the Trump administration has been doing from the very beginning of the pandemic: Pretending that Covid-19 is rapidly disappearing in the US and won’t be a problem pretty soon, while discouraging the use of the most important tools for fighting it, especially massive testing, contact tracing and mask wearing.

In a history class I took in college, the professor was discussing the Allied bombing campaign in Germany during World War II. At first, the bombing was narrowly targeted at factories, railroads and other facilities needed for Germany’s war effort. However, the Allies soon realized that most of the bombs they were dropping weren’t hitting these facilities at all; they were simply killing civilians.

The professor continued by pointing out that, whenever you are trying to hit a target but keep missing it, you have two choices. The first is to increase the accuracy of your strikes, but the second is to simply expand the target, so that what were previously considered misses were actually hits. Then you can keep on doing what you’re doing, knowing that you’re now meeting your stated goal. In the WWII case, this meant that the revised goal of bombing attacks on Germany (and later Japan) became causing big civilian casualties, as a way of breaking the “will” of the people to resist (although that will proved very hard to break. It finally did break in Japan, with the dropping of two atomic bombs).

So you’ll be pleased to know that Trump hasn’t really been following a mad policy on Covid-19 after all. He’s actually pursuing a very rational strategy, endorsed by people (like his medical adviser Scott Atlas) with no knowledge of epidemiology, and more importantly no interest in considering actual facts in advocating their positions. And that policy is simply to infect as many people as possible as quickly as possible, while at the same time paying lip service to protecting the most vulnerable members of society (which of course implies that we’re deliberately not doing all we can to protect them now. This is certainly the case, but it takes my breath away to hear this explicitly acknowledged now. On the other hand, there are so many breathtaking revelations about this administration every week that it’s a wonder I get any oxygen at all).

What could possibly go wrong with this strategy?

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com