Right... without any proof they help the situation overall. ...I know. Hospitals and OSHA know dirty masks are major liability... But... we can keep pretending and faking people out.
"Some of you will die, and that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make" as he endorses Herd Immunity over a vaccine... Donald Trump’s Final Pitch to Americans: Drop Dead The White House has “embraced” a pandemic strategy that could require 2 million people to die https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/donald-trump-coronavirus-plan Donald Trump’s prospects are not looking great. As of last week, Joe Biden was leading the president by an average of 9.7 points nationally and five to seven points in major battleground states. Biden has a much higher favorability rate than Hillary Clinton did this late in the race. The president is down in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the states to which he owes his 2016 win. He’s hemorrhaging support from women (which might have something to do with the fact that one of his campaign advisers called one of the most prominent women in America a “power-hungry, smug bitch”). Seniors, who were essential to his political fortune four years ago, have been souring on him. And on arguably the biggest issue of the day—COVID-19—two thirds of Americans think Trump has done a terrible job. Against this backdrop, one might think that Trump would spend the next two and a half weeks swearing to voters that he’s finally taking the pandemic seriously and that he’s got a plan to tackle this thing, even if it means something like a national mask mandate, a move that experts say could stop the virus in its tracks in four to eight weeks. Instead he’s got a slightly different plan: ignore the whole thing and let nature take its course, i.e. trust in herd immunity, which could require some 2 million Americans to die. Per the New York Times: The White House has embraced a declaration by a group of scientists arguing that authorities should allow the coronavirus to spread among young healthy people while protecting the elderly and the vulnerable—an approach that would rely on arriving at “herd immunity” through infections rather than a vaccine. Many experts say “herd immunity”—the point at which a disease stops spreading because nearly everyone in a population has contracted it—is still very far-off. Leading experts have concluded, using different scientific methods, that about 85 to 90% of the American population is still susceptible to the coronavirus. On a call convened Monday by the White House, two senior administration officials, both speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to give their names, cited an October 4 petition titled The Great Barrington Declaration, which argues against lockdowns and calls for a reopening of businesses and schools.... Its lead authors include Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at Stanford University, the academic home of Dr. Scott Atlas, President Trump’s science adviser. Dr. Atlas has also espoused herd immunity. The declaration’s architects include Sunetra Gupta and Gabriela Gomes, two scientists who have proposed that societies may achieve herd immunity when 10 to 20% of their populations have been infected with the virus, a position most epidemiologists disagree with. “Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” the declaration states, adding, “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.” “The idea that herd immunity will happen at 10 or 20% is just nonsense,” Dr. Christopher J.L. Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, told the Times. In August the Washington Post reported that roughly 65 to 70% of a population would need to be infected to achieve herd immunity, and with a population of 328 million, the U.S. could need 2.13 million people to die to cross that threshold. This brilliant idea from the White House comes on the heels of an outbreak in Trump’s inner circle that has infected dozens of people so far. On Tuesday night the Department of Labor said the wife of Secretary Eugene Scalia had tested positive for the coronavirus, which is not entirely surprising given that she attended the super-spreader event at the White House to celebrate nominating Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. On Wednesday, Trump is scheduled to hold a rally in Iowa, where hospitalizations for the virus have hit a new high. Des Moines, where the event will take place, has been told to limit gatherings to 25 people on account of being labeled—by the White House!—a “yellow zone” for transmission of the virus. “If anyone in attendance is infectious, we are potentially looking at another super-spreader event,” Lina Tucker Reinders, executive director of the Iowa Public Health Association, told the Des Moines Register. “We again today set a record high for hospitalizations. We need to be focusing on bringing those numbers down and controlling the spread, not enabling large events, political or otherwise.”
Just out of curiosity, did he actually say the quote you have him quoted as saying in your opening line? Or is that more of your "creative editing" that you tend to do?
Scientists Are Slamming The Great Barrington Declaration’s Call For “Herd Immunity” A week after White House officials met with scientists endorsing herd immunity, dozens of other researchers called it “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/herd-immunity-great-barrington-backlash-letter As the Trump administration signals a willingness to build “herd immunity” by purposely allowing the coronavirus to spread, major scientific organizations are denouncing a plan they say would be life-threatening and practically impossible. That plan, laid out by three scientists in a controversial document called the "Great Barrington Declaration," calls for only protecting “vulnerable” people and letting everyone else get infected with COVID-19. The authors discussed the strategy in a meeting with two top White House officials last week. This week, top US heath official Anthony Fauci, the head of the World Health Organization, and more than a dozen groups representing thousands of infectious disease and public health experts fiercely pushed back in a series of formal denouncements. “We just gotta look that square in the eye and say it’s nonsense,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told ABC News Thursday. “Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic. It is scientifically and ethically problematic,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday. And on Wednesday, a group of 80 researchers called the idea “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence” in a letter published in the Lancet, a high-profile medical journal. The Great Barrington Declaration, published on a website sponsored by a libertarian think tank, argues that the coronavirus is not that dangerous for many people, so “those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.” Citing “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies,” the letter calls for bringing back in-person teaching, reopening restaurants and businesses, and resuming large gatherings like concerts and sports events. So far, the letter has been signed by more than 35,000 self-identified scientists and clinicians — although some signatories, such as “Dr. Johnny Bananas” and “Professor Cominic Dummings," were identified as clearly fake. All of the signatures were later made private. The document’s architects are a trio of scientists from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford universities, some of whom have been telling policymakers for months that the virus is not that deadly. Last week they met with Alex Azar, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and Scott Atlas, a Stanford neuroradiologist on the White House coronavirus task force. Both expressed support for the scientists’ views. Afterward, Azar tweeted that they heard “strong reinforcement of the Trump Administration’s strategy of aggressively protecting the vulnerable while opening schools and the workplace.” And on a call convened by the White House on Monday, anonymous senior administration officials referenced the Great Barrington Declaration to reporters. “We’re not endorsing a plan,” one official said, according to the Washington Post. “The plan is endorsing what the president’s policy has been for months.” The Great Barrington Declaration is stirring public interest months into a pandemic that the federal government has failed to control. More than 216,000 Americans have died. Life has been upended in virtually every sense: Jobs have been lost on a massive scale, gatherings large and small canceled, and businesses, schools, and restaurants closed. Data indicates that the pandemic is having non–COVID-19 health effects: People are putting off getting screened for cancer and treated for strokes, and more adults are having issues related to mental health and substance abuse. As the world awaits a vaccine, “pandemic fatigue” is spreading in the US and elsewhere. In the UK, where COVID-19 cases are surging again, lawmakers are contending with public resistance as they seek to implement a second round of lockdown measures. But the mainstream scientific community says that essentially giving up on protecting healthy people from the virus is not an acceptable solution. Up to 90% of the US population remains susceptible to the virus, according to recent CDC estimates. Health experts worry that letting the pathogen spread unchecked in healthy people, in the absence of a vaccine, would sicken, hospitalize, and kill many of them, not to mention overwhelm the healthcare system. And even if young, healthy people die at relatively lower rates, they can still transmit the virus to at-risk groups or join the “long-haulers” who endure debilitating symptoms for months on end. It also is not guaranteed that survivors will become immune forever: No one knows how long immunity lasts, and there have been a handful of reported reinfections. These experts also say that it would also be next to impossible to isolate the millions of “vulnerable” Americans who are elderly, have preexisting conditions, or live in multigenerational households. The Great Barrington Declaration proposes to sequester these groups from the rest of society but does not provide a plan for how to do so. “Promoting the concept of ‘herd immunity’ as framed in a recently circulated document as an answer to the COVID-19 pandemic is inappropriate, irresponsible and ill-informed,” said the heads of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association, which respectively represent more than 12,000 infectious disease experts and 6,000 HIV/AIDS specialists, in a statement Wednesday. In another joint statement on Wednesday, 14 prominent public health organizations declared that “the suggestions put forth by the Great Barrington Declaration are NOT based in science” and they would “haphazardly and unnecessarily sacrifice lives.” “The declaration is not a strategy, it is a political statement,” wrote the groups, which included the American Public Health Association, the Association of Public Health Laboratories, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Security. “It ignores sound public health expertise. It preys on a frustrated populace. Instead of selling false hope that will predictably backfire, we must focus on how to manage this pandemic in a safe, responsible, and equitable way.” And a group of 80 researchers is countering the Great Barrington Declaration with an open letter of its own: the John Snow Memorandum, named for the 19th-century physician who tracked the source of a cholera outbreak in London and is considered a founder of modern epidemiology. In the letter, the signatories acknowledged that there has been “widespread demoralisation and diminishing trust” in the face of ongoing restrictions in countries that have failed to adopt “adequate provisions to manage the pandemic and its societal impacts.” But society cannot simply allow the virus to spread unchecked in large groups of people, argued the letter, which was led by 30 researchers and signed by 50 others spanning public health, epidemiology, medicine, health policy, and other disciplines. Measures such as widespread testing and contact tracing need to be implemented, “and they must be supported by financial and social programmes that encourage community responses and address the inequities that have been amplified by the pandemic,” they wrote. They cited Japan, Vietnam, and New Zealand as countries that have shown that transmission can be controlled. “The evidence is very clear: controlling community spread of COVID-19 is the best way to protect our societies and economies until safe and effective vaccines and therapeutics arrive within the coming months,” they wrote. “We cannot afford distractions that undermine an effective response; it is essential that we act urgently based on the evidence.”
Jem, stop. He admitted the unclear comment and he owned up to it. Reward good behavior, don't insult it.
Some scientists... are slamming. Generally those who do not acknowledge that natural herd immunity can be reached at far lower levels than vaccine immunity. 2. its really a for letting the low risk live there lives as they see fit to balance risk vs benefit. Since locking the low risk down down causes significant harm and does do any good.... as we see the virus come back once let the low risk out.
Let's see what Dr. Fauci has to say about the Great Barrington "natural herd immunity" nonsense... Dr. Fauci says letting the coronavirus spread to achieve herd immunity is ‘nonsense’ and ‘dangerous’ https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/15/dr-...-herd-immunity-is-nonsense-and-dangerous.html Letting the coronavirus rip through the U.S. population unchecked to achieve so-called herd immunity would cause a lot of unnecessary deaths and the idea is “nonsense,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said. Fauci was asked about the “Great Barrington Declaration,” an online movement that favors herd immunity and was mentioned by a senior White House official on a call with reporters. The declaration assumes people who are vulnerable to serious illness from Covid-19 live in facilities like nursing homes where they can be protected, but “that doesn’t work,” Fauci said. Letting the coronavirus rip through the U.S. population unchecked to infect as many people as possible to achieve so-called herd immunity would cause a lot of unnecessary deaths and the idea is “nonsense” and “dangerous,” the nation’s top infectious disease expert said Thursday. “I’ll tell you exactly how I feel about that,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said when asked about whether herd immunity is a viable strategy for the U.S. to adopt. “If you let infections rip as it were and say, ‘Let everybody get infected that’s going to be able to get infected and then we’ll have herd immunity.’ Quite frankly that is nonsense, and anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that that is nonsense and very dangerous,” Fauci told Yahoo News. Herd immunity happens when enough of the population is immune to a disease, making it unlikely to spread and protecting the rest of the community, the Mayo Clinic says. It can be achieved through natural infection — when enough people are exposed to the disease and develop antibodies against it — and through vaccinations. Most scientists think 60% to 80% of the population needs to be vaccinated or have natural antibodies to achieve herd immunity, global health experts say. However, the nation’s top health experts have said a majority of Americans remain susceptible to a coronavirus infection. “With this idea of herd immunity, this is a phrase that’s used when you use vaccination. When you vaccinate a certain amount of the population to be able to protect the rest of the population that isn’t able to get that vaccine,” Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the World Health Organization’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, told CNN’s “New Day” on Thursday. “Herd immunity as an approach by letting the virus circulate is dangerous, it leads to unnecessary cases and it leads to unnecessary deaths,” she said. Despite those concerns, a senior White House official briefing reporters on a call Monday mentioned an online movement called the “Great Barrington Declaration,” which favors herd immunity, NBC News reported. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has previously said that herd immunity “is not the strategy of the U.S. government with regard to coronavirus.” The Barrington declaration, however, assumes that people who are vulnerable to serious illnesses live in facilities like nursing homes where they can be protected, but “that doesn’t work,” Fauci said. That’s because in the population, roughly one-third of people are prone to developing serious side effects from Covid-19, including people who are elderly, obese, have underlying health conditions like heart disease and so forth, he said. “By the time you get to herd immunity you will have killed a lot of people that would’ve been avoidable,” he said. Fauci said that he has made his position on herd immunity known with the White House and added that Dr. Deborah Birx, the administration’s coronavirus task force coordinator, and Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agree. “All three of us are very clearly against that,” he said.
Let's see what an organization of 12,000 of the top infectious disease doctors in the U.S have to say... “Herd Immunity” is Not an Answer to a Pandemic https://www.idsociety.org/news--pub...herd-immunity-is-not-an-answer-to-a-pandemic/ Promoting the concept of “herd immunity” as framed in a recently circulated document as an answer to the COVID-19 pandemic is inappropriate, irresponsible and ill-informed. “Community immunity,” or “herd immunity,” a goal of vaccination campaigns, should never come at the cost of planned exposure to infection of millions of additional people as well as the severe illness and preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. To assert that stepping away from the vigilance needed to control the spread of this novel coronavirus and that abdication of efforts to control a pandemic that has overwhelmed health systems worldwide is a “compassionate approach” is profoundly misleading. As an association of more than 12,000 frontline infectious diseases scientists, physicians, public health experts, and other health professionals, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and its HIV Medicine Association strongly denounce the “declaration,” released without data or evidence, that states this crisis can be controlled in the absence of critical public health measures. As specialists committed to protecting individual and public health, we have made policy recommendations to curtail the spread of COVID-19 in keeping with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines and well established public health principles for the control of an infectious respiratory pandemic. These include restricting the size of gatherings, maintaining safe physical distance and wearing masks in any setting where the risk of transmission exists. We recommend minimizing risks of infection by observing strict hygiene and infection control measures that include accurate and accessible testing for the virus, contact tracing and quarantine of those potentially exposed, and isolation of people who have become infected. These recommendations are made to avert preventable infections, illnesses and deaths, minimize the impacts of the pandemic on essential workers, including health care personnel, prevent rising rates of severe illness from overwhelming health care facilities and reduce the spread of disease so that businesses and institutions can safely re-open. We will continue to support those guidelines as long as the spread and impacts of the virus exceed the resources and tools needed to mitigate its threats. Thomas File, M.D., FIDSA – President, Infectious Diseases Society of America Judith Feinberg, M.D. – Chair, HIV Medicine Association