White House Finally Announces Coronavirus ‘Plan’: Let ’Er Rip
Giving up on prevention is a death sentence for hundreds of thousands more Americans
Lest there were any doubts about the White House’s pandemic response plans, President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, made the approach clear over the weekend. The apparent “plan” is to give up on prevention efforts and allow the virus to spread as much as possible — rip off the Band-Aid and see what happens.
“We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Meadows said Sunday. “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics, and other mitigations.”
Because therapeutics have yet to offer any “cure” for Covid-19, and given that widespread deployment of any successful vaccine is months away, the “let ’er rip” strategy is a capitulation to the coronavirus and a death sentence for 500,000 to perhaps 2 million Americans, according to the scientists who study the spread of the virus.
Herd mentality
The White House has embraced an idea called “natural herd immunity,” whereby enough people have been infected and supposedly have immunity to a disease so that it dies out. But some 40% to 70% of the population would have to be infected before herd immunity might significantly slow…
