According to three senior health officials working with the White House Coronavirus Task Force, President Donald Trump and his team of White House advisers have accepted the controversial belief that mob immunity will help curb the spread of COVID-19. More worrying for those officers: they have begun to take steps to turn the concept into policy.
Officials say White House adviser Scott Atlas began pushing the crowds’ immunity this past summer against significant pressure from scientists, doctors and infectious disease specialists, a concept that is dangerous and will result in many more Americans getting sick and dying. Since then, various White House advisers have tried to disprove the idea that the administration has developed a strategy for Covid-19 based on pastoral power, which assumes that if enough people contract a disease and become immune to it, Then in the future the spread among them will be less of a wider population.
“Crowd immunity has never been a strategy,” Kaylage McKinney, the White House press secretary for the Trump administration, told reporters in September. And in a statement to the Daily Beast, Atlas insisted he was not in pursuit.
“As we have made clear many times on record and in print, we strongly deny that anyone advising the White House, the President, the administration or the President pursued or advocated for any strategy to achieve coronavirus infection by spreading coronavirus” spread in the community. Is, ”the statement read. “That president has never been advised that he is not part of any of the president’s policies.”
But those working on the government’s cowardly response say the use of a phrase like “mob immunity” by the White House and Atlas is just semantics. Privately, One of those sources said the real policy business is clearly framed around a mob immunity approach; Primarily, that the government should “give priority to protecting vulnerabilities while allowing everyone else to be infected,” Saadhak said.
In a recent call with reporters in which the Daily Beast took part, administration officials placed a new emphasis on the president’s coronavirus policy, giving the key to “protecting the vulnerable” among nursing home patients. An official said the coronavirus was “dangerous for a certain subset of the population” and that “most people do exceptionally well.”
On the call, officials drew attention to a Great Barrington study, assembled by a team of scientists who advocate trying to reach the crowd’s immune system through the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19.
Although Atlas insisted he had not “suppressed animal immunity”, another official said Atlas had actually started advocating the idea – and the president had accepted it – at the same time telling task force officials what the administration had planned. Were being boycotted from conversations about. Handle what many predict will be a difficult fall season. Since then, officials have said, the White House has focused heavily on vaccinating Americans and the fight against the community has spread to a task force official: Dr. Deborah Burks. BRICS, the White House task force coordinator, has been trying for months to persuade Americans to wear masks and social distance.. In his absence and the less frequent meetings of the task force, Atlas has emerged as a presidential candidate.
“It’s all an atlas,” said one of the officials who spoke to the Daily Beast. “I find it awkward … border with ridiculous. Everything that comes out of the mouth of the atlas is ready to tear it apart and then worry about protecting sensitive people. Everything he says draws attention to the fact that he believes animal immunity is a good option. Yet she denied that she was pushing the Hood immune system as a strategy, saying, “No, that’s not what I’m doing.” But it is. ”
Heard immunity is the scientific term that embraces the idea that “while the majority of the population is immune to infectious disease, it provides indirect protection … to those who are not immune to the disease,” according to the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. According to. While animal immunity has been used as a way to control the spread of other diseases, the school’s analysis notes that “the situation is very different for SARS-COV-2: COVID-19 increases the risk of serious disease and death. ”
Health officials say the President’s practical acceptance of animal husbandry immunity could lead to a dangerous and potentially fatal new phase of the epidemic, even if concerted efforts are made, including screening and protecting seniors and people with comorbidities. Scientists warn that if the administration continues to focus only on protecting people in nursing homes, it will ignore those who come out of the most vulnerable populations but who can still infect the virus, and Can last for a long time. Health difficulties.
“It’s a really dangerous idea. And that’s a potentially fatal mistake, “said Tom Frieden, a former director of disease control centers in the Obama administration. “They know that word [herd immunity] Toxic, but that’s exactly what they recommend. I mean, Scott Atlas said it’s a positive thing. That’s not a positive thing. Each infection is one step back. “
Frieden said focusing on protecting vulnerable people does not make sense in terms of public health.
“What we’re seeing all over the country is that you see cases start in a group, and then they go to the elderly in a week, two weeks, three weeks, and then you see an increase in cases and then hospitalization and then inevitably. More deaths occur, ”he said.
Officials say Atlas among health officials working on Covid’s response has basically been alone in his belief that letting people get sick from the disease could be a net positive. “We can infect a lot of people – who are not at risk of death or who are in serious hospital care,” Atlas, a neuroscientist who has become Trump’s coronavirus guru and has no background in dealing with the outbreak, told CNN in August. Illness is necessary. “
“If we allow them to become infected, to be divine, to develop immunity on their own and to be more immune in the community, we can eliminate the risk of the virus, including the threat to vulnerable people. That’s what bunch immunity is all about, ”he said.
For Trump, advocating this approach to Atlas represents an opportunity. The president has long pushed for less restrictive public health measures to combat COVID under the recognition of the need to prioritize the country’s economic interests. Bunch immunity as a principle “Basically it allowed the country to reopen, if we didn’t pinch the turn, ”an official said.
“There is a false story Has been developed, where either you stop, or you let everyone do what they have to do and let them be affected, ”an official said. “You can still keep businesses open. Even if you wear a mask, avoid crowds and social distance, you can slowly regain the economy. “
The August interview with Atlas caused a significant uproar among officials assigned to respond to the coronavirus outbreak. The Washington Post first reported in August that Atlas was urging the White House to encourage mob immunity. The next day, Atlas reappeared on CNN, this time saying he did not advocate the concept.
“From there, no defense attorneys have come from me to anyone in the administration, from the president to the task force, to whom I’ve spoken,” Atlas said. “The president does not have a strategy to advocate mob immunity. The task force does not have a strategy to advocate mob immunity. “
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