Advice from the Good Doctor


While Dr. Fauci and many others are advising people to cancel Thanksgiving gatherings with anyone other than household members (and especially when one or more attendees are elderly), it’s quite refreshing to see a senior White House advisor and eminent radiologist (who seems to think that his training was actually in epidemiology – perhaps he read his diploma wrong) not only contradicting that advice, but encouraging people to have big gatherings.

Trump coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas appeared Monday night on Fox News and said “This kind of isolation is one of the unspoken tragedies of the elderly who are now being told don't see your family at Thanksgiving. For many people this is their final Thanksgiving, believe it or not. What are we doing here? I think we have to have a policy, which I have been advocating, which is a whole person, whole health policy. It's not about just stopping cases of COVID. We have to talk about the damage of the policy itself.”

As you may know, Dr. Atlas has been a big advocate of the idea of herd immunity (while constantly denying that that term applies) as what will finally save the US. This means we should do everything we can to encourage as many younger people as possible to catch Covid-19, while at the same time taking lots of steps to protect the most vulnerable (primarily the elderly. I haven’t heard him voicing a lot of concern about Black and Hispanic people, whose likelihood to die from Covid is about three times that of White people. I’m sure he’ll get around to them sooner or later).

Of course, this is the only possible rationale for the actions and words of the current administration, although with this WH crowd in most cases the rationale has to be manufactured after the actions and words have been put forward. This is almost certainly the case with the Good Doctor’s theorizing.

You might notice there’s a contradiction between what Dr. Atlas said on Fox News and his professed desire to protect the elderly: He’s advocating they be part of the celebration, yet that increases the likelihood that they’ll get sick, if they have otherwise been social distancing.

So it seems that Dr. Atlas is really saying “We’re all going to die anyway, and elderly people obviously have the fewest years of life ahead of them. Instead of trying to eke out a few more years by living carefully, just go ahead and have a great last party. It’s worth sacrificing 5-10 years of your life.”

Sure makes a lot of sense to me!

 

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

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How naïve I was…

On March 18, 2020, I put up my fifth post in this blog (this is my 356 th post, for those keeping score at home). I had written my first pandemic post (although I wrote it on my cybersecurity blog ) on Saturday, March 14. This was right after I’d read a really disturbing article that shattered my assumption that the unfortunate incident in Wuhan two months previous could never happen here. I recently reread the March 18 post because a significant number of people have been reading it in the last couple of months, even though I haven’t referred to it at all. Of course, I can’t ask those people why they’re reading it, but what struck me when I reread it was my (in retrospect, of course) incredible naivete when I wrote it. It’s instructive to read some of my statements, a little more than three years later: Since there have already been thousands of deaths worldwide (but not yet tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions), the battle is to keep that number as low as pos...
Read more

It’s all about health care

Over the weekend, there were two momentous events in Washington that will undoubtedly have a seriously negative effect on the health (or lack thereof) of the American people. However, just one of these events on its surface seems to be about healthcare. In this post, I will discuss the one that doesn’t seem to be about healthcare, but actually is. Barring some unforeseen development before then, in my next post I’ll discuss the other event. The former event was the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday and Mitch McConnell’s immediate (i.e. about 1 ½ hours after her passing was announced) announcement that he would push through Trump’s nominee before the election – assuming four Republican Senators don’t block that process. Why is this event about healthcare? Because the Supreme Court is set to decide in December a case that would literally overturn Obamacare and cause more than 20 million people to lose healthcare coverage in the middle of a pandemic.   The case is based on a ...
Read more

The tragedy in India

For a great account of what’s going on in India, read this WaPo article. And read this Atlantic article for a good commentary on how India’s wealthier class ignored the lessons of the 1984 Bhopal disaster and let the health care system stagnate, leaving the country unable to handle this sudden surge in the virus. Although it's wrong to say the system stagnated. For the wealthy, it became (and remains) world-class. Does this remind you of another health care system that, at least in the early days of the pandemic, was overwhelmed?  Both articles call attention to the Modi government’s failures, but they both try to spread the blame around. Yes, others are responsible, but the fact that – after a terrible response to the first wave of the virus – the government got lulled into thinking they’d beaten it, so they could open up completely (including holding big political rallies and allowing the annual Kumbh Mela to take place – this year in Haridwar, which I’ve visited and can ...
Read more