As the pandemic ravages the US, the Centers for Disease Control has updated its forecast to 83,000 deaths over the next three weeks. The expected death toll before the end of President Donald Trump’s term stands at 400,000. A disturbing report to the members of the US House of Representatives suggests getting people infected in pursuit of 'herd immunity' was the Trump administration’s plan all along. Two new studies show the approach was dead wrong.
In a supplemental memo on Investigation into Political Interference with Coronavirus Response dated December 16, and sent to the members of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, private strategy sessions are described in which Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Senior Adviser Paul Alexander “explicitly endorsed allowing the disease to spread widely among ‘[i]nfants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle-aged with no conditions, etc,.’ writing, ‘we use them to develop herd…We want them infected’.”
The memo goes on to note that Trump and other officials repeated these views, “raising the serious possibility that key Administration officials have pursued a deliberate or reckless policy of allowing Americans to be infected with the coronavirus.”
“We always know the cases would rise,” the memo quotes Alexander, adding that “he also urged colleagues to suppress scientific information about the risk posed by the virus to minority communities that he admitted was ‘very accurate’, out of concern that it would be ‘use[d] against the president’”.
But the rise in cases corresponded to a rise in deaths of young people over that period of time, at once debunking the myth that COVID-19 is a minor inconvenience on young adults, and at the same time showing the failure of that approach.
Studies by JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Annals of Internal Medicine show “COVID-related deaths in young adults exceeded opioid overdoses, a leading cause of death in this age group, in 20 per cent of US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regions during the first half of the pandemic”. The studies claim 4,535 deaths from March through July in younger adults aged 25 to 44, amounting to 38 per cent of excess deaths out of a total of 173,300 (79.5 per cent) of excess deaths from March through August, were COVID-19 related.
Additionally, the Annals researchers wrote, “Estimating the true burden of COVID-19 will require continued monitoring of excess deaths by cause. Additional non–COVID-19 deaths due to the pandemic will probably occur for many years because of delays in cancer screening, surgery and other essential health care.”
The 'herd immunity' goal was never officially disclosed as a strategy. In fact, it was the object of repeated lukewarm, 'wink, wink' denials despite Trump himself — very publicly — acting to advance it in practice. After holding mask-free, social distance-absent events that flaunted his defiance of public safety recommendations, Trump, his wife and their son contracted and survived COVID-19 infections, and Trump publicly ripped off his mask in a choreographed television event and advised Americans not to be “afraid” of COVID-19.
Sweden, a much smaller and manageable country, tried herd immunity and failed. The King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, admitted as much. “I think we have failed. We have a large number that died and that is terrible,” said the king. “Many, many people have died, and that is sad, very sad,” said Stefan Löfven, the country’s prime minister.
But even as the projected American death numbers top those of US soldiers that died in the four years of World War II, Trump’s White House is paying little attention to masks or distance at the many Christmas receptions and celebrations it has scheduled.
Despite prescribed social distancing and mask mandate interventions to kick in areas where a threshold of 8 deaths per million is crossed, no mitigation has been reinstated even though many states in the US today have reached as many as 13 deaths per million and ICU units are basically full, with zero per cent availability in places like California.
The lack of resources and every place struggling to keep up with the COVID-19 patients will leave people needing non-Covid intervention without treatment.
Nearly 4,000 deaths a day, every day is a brutal number. The hurricane that shattered the Texas city of Galveston on September 8, 1900, killed between 8,000 and 12,000 people. In the Battle of Antietam in the Civil War on September 17, 1862, around 3,700 soldiers from the northern and southern states were killed. Every day in December 2020, more Americans die than in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
As the US continues to break records of the dead, hospitalised and infected people, the evidence that these were part of a behind-the-scenes herd strategy pushed by Trump Administration members is getting a fresh review by congressional oversight committees.
Dr. Scott Atlas — the controversial neuro-radiologist Trump put in as his coronavirus adviser and who repeatedly questioned the need for masks and other measures to control the pandemic — advanced a herd strategy, which he later denied. Atlas has recently resigned, but the effects of his time undermining the work of the coronavirus task force still remain.
Two Americans surrender their lives to COVID-19 every minute of every day in mid-December. Despite the beginning of vaccinations with the Pfitzer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, there are no signs the pandemic will abate significantly in the near future, especially with the projected spikes in cases due to the Christmas and New Year holiday gatherings.
There are17,233,022 cases of COVID-19 in the US at the time of writing this article, and 311,010 have died, more than in any other country on Earth.
