August 20, 2020
(Image Credit: Official White House Photographers), from
Jonathan Howard MD, Jonathan. We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID (p. 186). Redhawk Publications. Kindle Edition.
“We want them infected” is part of a message Dr. Paul Alexander, a science advisor in Trump’s HHS, wrote on July 4, 2020 to the HHS assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo and six other senior officials. The full quote is:
“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…"
Jonathan Howard, MD used this quote for the title of his book, We want them infected, How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID. I wrote this story in cooperation with Dr. Howard.
Dr. Howard is the Chief of Neurology at Bellevue Hospital in New York, where he worked throughout the pandemic, including during the worst of the COVID, when 800 people a day were dying in the city. “Overall, I saw more people die in a few weeks than I had my entire career,” Dr. Howard wrote.
We Want Them Infected shows in horrifying detail that “herd immunity” was based on a foundation of deadly false beliefs held by many of the doctors and others advising the Trump administration in the early stages of COVID. These beliefs included:
1. Young and healthy people were not at risk from the virus
2. The elderly and sick could be shielded from risk by separation from the rest of the population.
3. Pursuing herd immunity would minimize illness and death from COVID
Each of these presumptions was wrong and fatal.
1. Hundreds of thousands of young, middle-aged, and healthy people died and were sickened by COVID-19
In April 2020, Dr. Scott Atlas, soon to be a primary Trump COVID advisor, wrote to Seema Verma, Administrator of Trump’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid that the virus would cause about 10,000 deaths, and mingling of the non-elderly population should be encouraged because “ Vital population immunity is prevented by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem.”
In June 2022, a House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus issued a report naming Atlas as the leader of the failed herd immunity strategy: The Atlas Dogma: The Trump Administration’s Embrace of a Dangerous And Discredited Herd Immunity Via Mass Infection Strategy. Dr. Howard relies on and quotes extensively from this Report.
This House Report was largely ignored by the media, including The New York Times.
Here’s the Alexander quote again:
“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…"
Let’s see how that strategy worked out:
CDC Death Tolls as of September 23, 2023 (Table 1)
· nearly 2,000 “infants, kids and teens” dead from the virus
· nearly 28,000 “young adults” dead from the virus,
· nearly 250,000 “middle aged” dead from the virus,
· in total nearly 300,000 people having “zero to little risk” dead from the virus.
The herd immunity policy was informal White House policy in early 2020, and later set forth in an October 4, 2020 document filled with falsehoods and unachievable policies known as the “Great Barrington Declaration” (the “GBD”), which was sponsored by a libertarian think tank, the American Institute for Economic Research (also known as an unapologetic proponent of child-labor.) The authors of the GBD were invited to DC to speak with Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Alex Azar on October 5 ,2020. They also advised Florida Governor Ron DeSantis throughout. The GBD stated: “For children, the COVID-19 mortality risk is less than for the annual influenza.” But in reality, 112 children were dead of COVID by October 2020, compared with one flu death during the entire 2020-21 season.
The GBD and its proponents also ignored the severe non-fatal effects of COVID on children and others under 65. COVID hospitalized 200,000 children, and some were very sick, needing mechanical ventilation in the ICU. Some children with COVID have had strokes, seizures, or needed amputations. Around 9,500 children have developed multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) MIS-C, and most of these children go to the ICU. At least 79 children have died from MIS-C. Some children suffer from disabling Long COVID, and there may be serious long-term consequences of repeat infections for developing children.
Millions of adults have also suffered severe non-fatal illnesses from COVID, including cognitive and neurological impairment, greater frequency of heart attacks and high blood pressure, damage to the immune system, and liver and kidney disease. Many of these illnesses have been present in those suffering from long COVID
These are horrifying statistics, but Dr. Howard adds his own personal experience on the front line, witnessing suffering and death among those Alexander called “zero to little risk,” like a 23-year-old with no pre-existing conditions. (p. 45). Virtually none of those promoting herd immunity through mass infection were caring for COVID patients in 2020.
2. The elderly could not be effectively shielded from the rest of of the population.
In the summer of 2020, I made the mistake of engaging in an email exchange with a college classmate about the Trump administration COVID policy. Particularly troubling was his reference to vulnerable populations as “endangered species” who merely needed to be warned about COVID and segregated from the younger population. Any lockdown should end for everyone else, he wrote.
But there was no real plan to do this, just a couple of ideas thrown onto paper with no real detail for accomplishing them. The GBD referenced articles with vague suggestions but bereft of any real-world plan to accomplish them. According to one article referenced in the GBD:
During times when transmission is high, older people should be offered home delivery of groceries and other essentials. At those times, it is best to meet family and friends outdoors. We should make rapid testing available for visiting relatives. Free N95 masks and instructions on their appropriate use should be provided when potential exposure cannot be avoided.
Newsweek, October 31, 2020
How would this be done? One of the GBD leaders actually said “we could have offered DoorDash to older people.” As Dr. Howard notes,
Though they were calling for one of the greatest logistical challenges in the history of humanity in the middle of a pandemic, the attitude of the GBD authors was basically someone else should figure out how to actually do this.
We Want Them Infected” p. 147.
Even attempting the impossible goal of segregating older Americans from others would have required a massive new social welfare program involving new housing, huge amounts of food deliveries, and payments to elderly workers for staying home, “like trying to build NASA from scratch in two weeks.” We Want Them Infected, p. 148.
3. The Herd Immunity strategy increased death and illness from COVID
In June 2020, Atlas told Tucker Carlson,
We like the fact that there’s a lot of cases in low-risk populations, because that’s exactly how we’re going to get herd immunity, population immunity, when low-risk people, with no significant problem handling this virus.
Read that again: “We like the fact that there’s a lot of cases in low-risk populations.” Except they weren’t “low-risk,” and even those that may have been low-risk often spread it it to higher risk people. One recent study of nearly 850,000 American households, found that 70.4% COVID-19 transmissions originated with a child. This is Atlas’s version of “We Want Them Infected.”
In August 2020, Atlas convened a group at the White House, including Dr. Joseph Ladapo, now Florida’s anti-vax surgeon general and others who subscribed to the ideas ultimately put in the GBD. According to Trump’s head of the CDC, Dr. Redfield, Atlas brought the group there “to convince people that herd immunity was going to save us, and this thing was going to go bye-bye.” [House report]. Even though SARS-CoV-2 was a brand-new virus, the GBD adherents were certain that one COVID infection led to robust immunity. As they wrote in the GBD:
Despite an estimated 750 million cases worldwide to date after 10 months living with the virus, we have seen only a handful of reinfections. If the virus is like other corona viruses in its immune response, recovery from infection will provide lasting protection against reinfection.
Over a million deaths later, including nearly 300,000 deaths of those under 65, Atlas and the GBD followers have not retracted their belief in herd immunity.
The “herd immunity” leaders became leaders in the anti-vax movement
This diary focuses on the pre-vaccine period, which coincides with the last year of Trump’s Presidency. It’s important to focus on this time because the public is still largely unaware of how reckless and deadly the Administration’s policy was.
The second part of the story is the post-vax period, encapsulated by the subtitle of We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID.
Dr. Howard had been studying the anti-vaccine movement for years prior to the pandemic, and this part of the book meticulously demonstrates how anti-vaccine arguments made previously against the MMR and HPV vaccines were recycled to cast doubt on the COVID vaccine, especially for young people. However, instead of fringe anti-vaccine doctors spreading anti-vaccine ideas, such misinformation originated from highly credentialed doctors at our top universities, influencing parents and powerful politicians.
Dr. Howard wrote the book earlier this year, and the lethal effects of these policies continue, particularly in Florida, where Governor DeSantis, with his Surgeon-General, Ladapo, continues to risk the lives of his constituents by advising those under 65 not to take the vaccine. I wrote about this in a prior diary, Homicide in progress in Florida.
The Trump administration’s reliance on Atlas, Ladapo and other discredited doctors unnecessarily caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and years of suffering for many who survived.
