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https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-05-23/column-these-experts-sold-the-u-s-on-a-disastrous-covid-plan-and-never-paid-a-professional-price>
"They’ve held credentials from some of the world’s most elite universities —
Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Oxford. They’ve been welcomed into the
highest government policy councils. They became fixtures on television news
shows and were quoted incessantly by some of the nation’s leading newspapers.
They’re a cadre of academics and scientists who pushed a discredited solution
to the COVID pandemic, shunning masks, school closings, even vaccines, all in
the name of reaching the elusive goal of “herd immunity,” resulting in what may
have been hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths.
That’s the contention of “We Want Them Infected,” a painstakingly documented
new book by Jonathan Howard, a neurologist at New York University and a veteran
debunker of the pseudoscience contaminating our efforts to fight the pandemic.
Howard takes his title from Paul Alexander, an epidemiologist in the Health and
Human Services Department during the Trump administration.
In July 2020, Alexander offered his view of how to exploit the relative risks
of COVID to discrete populations to reach herd immunity. The idea was that so
many people would eventually become naturally infected with the virus, and
therefore immune from further infection, that the virus would be unable to
spread further.
“Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no
conditions etc. have zero to little risk,” he told top HHS officials. “So we
use them to develop herd ... we want them infected.”
Alexander’s proposal was essentially a screed against lockdowns. That suited
the Trump White House, which was searching for ways around the economic
dislocations caused by the virus. But he was wrong about the toll of sickness
and death that would result, allowing the virus to rage among these ostensibly
low-risk groups, and wrong about the prospects of reaching herd immunity
naturally.
“We Want Them Infected” may be the most appalling and infuriating book you’ll
read about America’s response to the pandemic. It’s also essential reading.
The book is populated by quacks, mountebanks and charlatans — and not a few
scholars with distinguished academic records — many of whom appear to have been
seduced by the embrace of the right-wing echo chamber into promoting unproven
and disproved policies."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: June 1, 2023
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-83895060
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
