Trump’s top pandemic advisor, Scott Atlas, suggests the White House adopt the ‘herd immunity’ strategy against the Covid-19 virus, reports the Washington Post.
The post wrote that Scott Atlas, a neurological expert, who proposed this solution to combat the coronavirus, joined the White House’s COVID-19 advisory team just a month ago, and he “does not have a background in infectious diseases or epidemiology.”
What is Herd Immunity?
Herd immunity is a response in which the virus would be allowed to spread freely through the population. When a certain percentage of the population, almost 20-80% is infected with the disease, the population would develop resistance against the virus. This in theory would ultimately slow down the further spread of the disease.
But, many infectious disease experts do not agree with this proposition. They believe that this would be very dangerous and result in thousands of more deaths. As an example, Sweden had previously adopted the ‘herd immunity’ strategy but failed. Sweden suffered from thousand of deaths.
What Does The WHO and Dr. Fauci think?
The World Health Organization also does not favor this strategy. “If we think about herd immunity in a natural sense of just letting a virus run, it’s very dangerous,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on the COVID-19 pandemic. “A lot of people would die.”
Dr. Fauci has constantly come our against herd immunity. “If you look at the United States of America with our epidemic of obesity as it were, with the number of people with hypertension, with the number of people with diabetes, if everyone got infected, the death toll would be enormous and totally unacceptable,” Fauci said.
“And that’s the reason why we’re against saying ‘Let it fly! Let everybody get infected and we’ll be fine.’ That’s a bad idea,”
Dr. Fauci
However, Atlas, who had been previously advocating the reopening of the educational institutions, denied the news. Atlas said that “There is no policy of the President or this administration of achieving herd immunity. There never has been any such policy recommended to the President or to anyone else from me.”