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.

 

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