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Our View: Focused protection by three scientists Great Barrington Declaration offers president a convenient solution. A White House struggling to show competence as a pandemic surges in the midst of a reelection campaign has been offered a remarkable solution:Do next to nothing, and everything will be just fine. The fix bandied about in the Oval Office, according to newsreports, involves a concept known asherd immunity. Epidemiologists sayproper herd immunity is the goal of a new vaccine, where widespread immunization slows the spread of a disease until it eventually dies out. Whats being discussed in the White House is a variant of this. It argues thatwhile waiting for a vaccine, pandemic restrictions should be lifted onAmericans thought to be at minimal risk of death from COVID-19like younger people allowing them to “live their lives normally” and risk infection. The resulting cascade of theoretically mild cases, the argument goes, would use natural infection to hasten the same necessary herd immunity. Pixie dust and pseudoscienceThis is a convenient solution for Donald Trump. It fits neatly withinhis failure to produce a national plan for curtailingcoronavirus withrapid testing, contact tracing and isolatingthe infected. And it endorseshis mantra that states fully reopen for economic recovery, even as the disease spreads. Theres just one problem. Infectious disease experts say its junk science,and worse, would risk doubling or tripling the number of Americans dead from COVID-19. Marc Lipsitch, director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, admonishingly labeled the idea as “policy-based evidence-making rather than evidence-based policymaking. “”(It) is the most amazing combination of pixie dust and pseudoscience Ive ever seen,” said Michael Osterholm, headof the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
