Increasingly the worst assumptions about Donald Trump and his administration are proving to be correct. Have they just been incompetent, thinking in the short-term (or no term) or are they bad guys? Historians will have a field day when this crew leaves.
The latest bombshell report- is a report by Politico.
A top Trump appointee repeatedly urged top health officials to adopt a “herd immunity” approach to Covid-19 and allow millions of Americans to be infected by the virus, according to internal emails obtained by a House watchdog and shared with POLITICO.
“There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD,” then-science adviser Paul Alexander wrote on July 4 to his boss, Health and Human Services assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo, and six other senior officials.
“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…” Alexander added.
“[I]t may be that it will be best if we open up and flood the zone and let the kids and young folk get infected” in order to get “natural immunity…natural exposure,” Alexander wrote on July 24 to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn, Caputo and eight other senior officials. Caputo subsequently asked Alexander to research the idea, according to emails obtained by the House Oversight Committee’s select subcommittee on coronavirus.
Alexander also argued that colleges should stay open to allow Covid-19 infections to spread, lamenting in a July 27 email to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield that “we essentially took off the battlefield the most potent weapon we had…younger healthy people, children, teens, young people who we needed to fastly [sic] infect themselves, spread it around, develop immunity, and help stop the spread.”
A characteristic of this time in early 21st century politics is that under Trump many Republicans not just walked away from the “compassionate conservatism” as either a goal or good marketing phrase. A race has seemed to be underway to brand as cruel conservatism.
It’s likely to be much more difficult to cure among Trump and his followers than the coronavirus.
We know that early on there was right-wing indifference to the victims of the pandemic because they mostly seemed to be non-whites concentrated in Democratic parts of the country. (In the fall, Vanity Fair reported on a March meeting at FEMA after which, in the view of one attendee, “it seemed ‘very clear’ [Jared] Kushner was less interested in finding a solution because, at the time, the virus was primarily ravaging cities in blue states.”) But the pandemic has recently been at its worst in the Dakotas and other blood-red areas of America, and they continue to be indifferent to the suffering.
I don’t believe they’re cheering on a culling of people they see as unfit. I think they’ve been telling themselves lies in order to justify doing what they want to do regarding the virus.
…And Paul Alexander, in the messages quoted above, expresses an opinion that defies common sense: that young, healthy people can become infected to the virus harmlessly. This is premised on the notion that all young people are thin, fit, and healthy and socialize only with other young, fit, healthy young people, and that elderly people and people who have been in poor health can be sequestered completely away from the young and the fit. The absurdity of this can be seen by thinking about a college campus. Are there no older or less-than-perfectly-healthy professors? Or dining hall workers? Or security staff? Or workers and patrons in off-campus bars? Or people on the streets and in the stores near campus? And don’t many people with preexisting conditions — maybe even just asthma — want to work and be able to walk the streets? Don’t many more simply need to work? Has the Trump adniistration supported anything that would allow them to step away from their work indefinitely and be guaranteed it when the pandemic is under control?
Nowhere in the emails does Alexander appear to note that in order to achieve “herd immunity” in the United States, more than 2 million people might have to die, according to an August analysis by the Washington Post. Nor does he seem to acknowledge that young, asymptomatic people can pass the disease onto more vulnerable members of the population. Or that, as of late September, roughly 40,000 people under the age of 65 had died from COVID-19. He does, however, concede that the virus disproportionately affects minority populations—and then seems to suggest that health agencies should keep that information to themselves so as not to hurt Trump’s reelection chances, while claiming that statistics (like Black people being three times as likely as white people to get the coronavirus) are Democrats’ fault.
The revelation comes on the heels of the discovery by the subcommittee that CDC Director Robert Redfield allegedly directed his underlings to delete another Alexander email warning the CDC to keep quiet about COVID-19 spread among children because it was damaging to the administration.
In the new tranche of emails, Alexander, who served as a senior adviser to HHS Secretary Alex Azar, urged Health and Human Services assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo, Food and Drug Administrator Stephen Hahn and Redfield to allow mass infections.
Alexander was a top deputy to Caputo, the longtime Trump hype man and HHS official, and both men left the department in mid-September.
In a series of emails to Caputo and other HHS officials, he advocates “locking granny down” but letting young people roam free and get infected.
“It may be that it will be best if we open up and flood the zone and let kids and young folk get infected as we acutely lock down the elderly and at risk folk,” he wrote.
In another set of emails to the HHS group, Alexander acknowledges the catastrophe that could develop if his herd immunization plan went sideways.
“Only if the young who are getting infected with the increased testing and relaxed controls now…if they show serious illness needing ICU and oxygen, and die, then we know this virus has mutated lethally,” he said, adding “god forbid this ever happens.”
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.