[The Soup Nazi]

Brilliant piece in The New Yorker. It ain't gonna change any dotard's mind, but nothing is - Trump himself could shoot them in the dick and they'd justify it saying it was to protect the country from Meryl Streep's Satanic Castrating Plan, so it was patriotic not to have a dick at all. Makes sense? No, it doesn't; that's the point. Anyway, for those who still care, please read it:

How Trump Became the Pro-Infection Candidate

By Dhruv Khullar
October 23, 2020

Nine months into the pandemic, it’s a truism to say that America’s response has been politicized. Even so, with an election looming, the virus surging, and President Trump and others in government recently infected, our divisions now stand out with a startling, even brutal, clarity. There have always been two basic ways of looking at the coronavirus crisis. The first sees the minimization of death as a paramount goal; the second holds that significant death is inevitable and acceptable. Those who take the first view, including most medical and public-health professionals, advocate a temporary, science-driven restructuring of society, designed to save lives; those who take the second view, including the President and those in his circle, say that people die all the time, from car crashes, drug addictions, diseases, and the like, and argue that we don’t stop living to prevent them from dying. “Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu,” the President tweeted, earlier this month, after he was discharged from the hospital. “Are we going to close down our Country?” (Twitter flagged the tweet as misinformation since, in fact, far fewer than a hundred thousand people die from the flu each year.)

There are different ways of holding the we-all-gotta-go-sometime view. Someone who grasps it lightly might incline a little more toward risk-taking than caution in her personal choices. But over the course of the pandemic, the President and many of his followers have come to cling to it tightly, even triumphantly, brandishing it as a kind of ideology. In the final weeks of the campaign, they’ve taken the outlook to a new, disturbing place. Erin Perrine, the communications director for his campaign, has faulted Joe Biden for not getting infected, arguing that Trump “has experience now fighting the virus as an individual. Those firsthand experiences—Joe Biden, he doesn’t have those.” Shortly before leaving the hospital, the President tweeted that his own infection had left him feeling “better than I did 20 years ago!” Trump has turned against government scientists with a new ferocity, referring to them as “idiots” and calling Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, a “disaster.” The President has always seemed not to take the virus seriously. But, in recent weeks, something has changed.

An especially telling moment occurred on October 13th. According to the Times, two senior White House officials cited, in a background conversation with reporters, the Great Barrington Declaration—a document that argues for the pursuit of herd immunity through widespread infection instead of a vaccine. Although most Americans haven’t heard of the declaration, many in the medical community have; Fauci captured the consensus view when, speaking to George Stephanopoulos, he called its core ideas “ridiculous.” Although its primary authors are three professors at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Oxford, respectively, the declaration hasn’t received the imprimatur of a medical or scientific institution; instead, it’s been sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank situated in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The declaration proposes that society should stay more or less open and that the virus should be allowed to infect the vast majority of the population while public-health officials focus on protecting the elderly and others who are especially vulnerable. (The details of the protective strategy go unspecified.) Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told the Washington Post that, although the declaration is sometimes presented as a “major alternative view that’s held by large numbers of experts,” it is, in fact, “fringe.” Infectious-disease specialists have signed it, but many of its thousands of signatories are either unqualified or fake (“Dr. Johnny Bananas,” “Dr. Person Fakename”).

The declaration has its roots in the early days of the pandemic, when some scientists asked whether herd immunity—which occurs when so many people have been infected or vaccinated that viral spread becomes unlikely—might be achievable more quickly and less painfully than was widely supposed, and without a vaccine. Perhaps the virus had already spread more than tests indicated, in which case it was more asymptomatic than we thought; perhaps certain people, having previously been infected by other, similar viruses, had some level of preëxisting immunity to it.

These were appealing possibilities. But, as time has passed, persuasive evidence for them has failed to materialize. In New York City, the original epicenter of the American pandemic, the vast majority of the population remains susceptible to the virus, even in parts of the city, such as Borough Park, that have experienced high rates of infection. In the U.S. as a whole, as many as nine in ten people still lack immunity to the virus. In this context, the swift reopening proposed by the declaration would result in a sharp spike in cases, with hundreds of thousands dying and tens of millions suffering serious and debilitating illness. This is likely to occur even if officials try to focus on protecting the vulnerable. The problem, ultimately, is that society cannot be easily divided into separate layers of medical risk. Sweden adopted lighter restrictions while seeking to protect its elderly citizens—and yet the coronavirus found ways around the barriers put in front of it. The country’s COVID-19 death rate is an order of magnitude higher than its neighbors’, and it has not achieved anything like herd immunity.

Throughout the pandemic, Trump and his team have often denied that they are pursuing herd immunity as a strategy. And yet their words and actions have belied their disavowal. “Once you get to a certain number—we use the word ‘herd’—once you get to a certain number, it’s going to go away,” the President told Fox News, in August. At a town hall in September, he promised the audience, “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.” On October 5th, the day after the declaration was released, its primary authors met with Alex Azar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who later said, “We heard strong reinforcement of the Trump Administration’s strategy.” Scott Atlas, a top White House coronavirus adviser, has said that “the thrust of the declaration is exactly aligned with the President.” (Atlas and Jay Bhattacharya, one of its authors, are colleagues at Stanford, where Bhattacharya studies health policy, not infectious diseases.) Speaking on the condition of anonymity, an Administration official told the Times that the White House wasn’t so much endorsing the declaration as acknowledging that the declaration “is endorsing what the President’s policy has been for months.” This is an extraordinary admission—appalling for Americans but perhaps freeing for Trump. He is granting himself license to move into an even higher register of incompetence, not just downplaying the threat but actively encouraging Americans to embrace it.


As a physician, of course, I take the medical view of the pandemic; in a sense, I’ve experienced it firsthand. Caring for COVID-19 patients at the height of New York City’s first wave, I watched as the medical profession, so often fragmented by ego and hierarchy, coalesced around the certainty that any loss of life is a tragedy. Nurses and doctors worked for weeks on end with little respite, often separated from their families to avoid infecting them. Clinicians poured in from across the country to help. Health-care leaders held daily briefings, scrambled for P.P.E., and searched for ventilators. Facilities crews reorganized hospitals. Everyone—even those who weren’t seeing patients—started wearing masks. On the coronavirus wards, we went further, donning goggles, gowns, gloves, respirators, and shoe coverings. Contagious patients were placed in negative-pressure rooms and sometimes seen through telemedicine; infected people who didn’t need hospitalization but couldn’t isolate from their loved ones at home were offered hospital-based housing. Husbands, wives, parents, and siblings died alone. Women gave birth without their partners present. All this was done not out of fear but out of concern. We didn’t want even a single person to get the virus unnecessarily. Our commitment was sharpened by the knowledge that we were witnessing many preventable deaths.

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