Trump team’s unique definition of ‘herd immunity’
Once upon a time, Americans enthusiastically lined their children up to be inoculated against polio. By the 1960s, when I received my pink lump of sugar with a weakened form of the virus, the deadly disease was already in retreat. But my parents’ generation remembered schoolmates who had been paralyzed or killed by the horrible contagion that had stalked the planet. They were relieved when scientists concocted a prophylactic.
My childhood, though, was spent in what now seems like alternate reality, where citizens trusted major institutions, where facts were respected, where newspapers and evening network broadcasts carried information that was considered reliable and necessary. If you don’t remember such a time, well … I’m not making this up.
In the early decades of the
21st century, science is under siege, facts are malleable and the news is just another weapon in continuing partisan warfare. The coronavirus itself has been weaponized in that war; President Donald Trump spent months minimizing the pandemic and disputing public health strategies necessary to curb its effects. That will make widespread acceptance of the new COVID-19 vaccines all the more difficult.
Skepticism from some communities is understandable, based on a long and miserable history of mistreatment by white medical authorities. The notorious 1932 Tuskegee syphilis “experiment” — in which federal government scientists allowed Black patients with syphilis to suffer long after there were antibiotics to cure it — was not shut down until 1972, only after it was leaked to the press.
But that history hardly explains the growing resistance to any and all vaccinations among certain white Americans who have taken up the anti-science cudgel to spread misinformation far and wide. They have already intimidated school authorities across the country, and those authorities have caved in to numerous exemptions that allow unvaccinated children to attend public schools. As a result, outbreaks of measles, rare in the United States by the 1990s, surged last year.
Vice President Mike Pence and his wife received their COVID vaccines Friday in a televised event, hoping to signal that the inoculation is safe. But Trump has pointedly denounced public health strategies — mocking those who wear masks, disputing his own scientists and flacking fake cures. Though the president invested heavily in the promise of a vaccine, it may now be too late for him to persuade his flat-earth followers to trust science.
Epidemiologists think that about 70% of Americans have to be vaccinated for the nation to achieve herd immunity, the point at which enough of us would have antibodies that the virus would be largely contained. Even without anti-vaccination resistance, public health experts say it will likely be late spring or early summer before enough doses of vaccine are available to get close to that target.
Some Trumpists have been advocating “herd immunity” for months now, though they have misused the term in ways that have left epidemiologists stunned. Scientists have referred to herd immunity in vaccination campaigns. They have not used it to suggest a Darwinist strategy of intentionally leaving a population vulnerable to see who survives.
But Paul Alexander, then an official in Health and Human Services, urged the administration to allow healthy people to contract COVID-19. “Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle-aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk … so we use them to develop herd … we want them infected,” he wrote in a July memo.
Not only is that callous, but it is also incorrect. The death rate from COVID-19 among younger, healthy patients is much lower than that for older or unhealthy ones, but it is not zero. “There is not a no-risk population. Youth does not confer safety, and it should not support complacency,” Dr. Lewis Kaplan, Philadelphia surgeon and president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine, told NBC News.
But out in Trumpland, there is an entrenched belief in a herd immunity that happens only after millions have already become infected with COVID-19, an illness that many still insist is no worse than the flu. Never mind that more than 300,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, while the annual influenza mortality rate ranges from 20,000- 60,000, according to federal data. Trumpists have managed to achieve an immunity that protects them from evidence and reason, and it may last a lifetime.