They have degrees from some of the most elite universities in the world – Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Oxford. They are invited to the highest political councils of the government. They became an integral part of television news programs and were constantly quoted by some of the country’s leading newspapers.

This is a group of academics and scientists who have promoted a discredited solution to the COVID pandemic by avoiding masks, school closures and even vaccines, all in the name of achieving the elusive goal of “herd immunity” which has led to what may have been hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths. .

This statement “We want them to get infected” a heavily documented new book by Jonathan Howard, an NYU neuroscientist and veteran exposing the pseudoscience that is polluting our pandemic efforts.

Howard received his title from Paul Alexander, an epidemiologist in the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services.

In July 2020, Alexander expressed his opinion on how to use the relative risks of COVID to discrete populations to achieve herd immunity. The idea was that so many people would eventually become infected with the virus naturally, and therefore immune to further infection, that the virus would not be able to spread further.

“Infants, children, teens, young adults, young adults, middle-aged people with no medical conditions, etc. have zero or little risk,” he told senior HHS officials. “So we use them to develop the herd… we want them to be infected.”

Alexander’s proposal was essentially a screed against self-isolation. This suited the Trump White House, which was looking for ways to deal with the economic turmoil caused by the virus. But he was wrong about the number of illnesses and deaths that could result from allowing the virus to run rampant among these supposedly low-risk groups, and wrong about the prospects for achieving herd immunity naturally.

We Want Them to Get Infected is perhaps the most horrific and infuriating book you’ll ever read about America’s response to a pandemic. This is also important reading.

The book is populated by charlatans, charlatans, and charlatans, as well as quite a few scholars of outstanding academic achievement, many of whom seem to have been seduced into the embrace of the right-wing echo chamber to promote unproven and debunked policies.

“It’s incredible that while doctors like me were working to treat COVID patients, begging people to stay at home and be safe,” Howard told me, “another group of doctors were working against us—well-known doctors who were willing were intentionally infecting unvaccinated young people with a promise that herd immunity will appear in a couple of months.”

They consistently downplayed the severity of the pandemic, but rarely, if ever, admitted that their optimistic forecasts of morbidity and mortality were consistently wrong.

There are a number of problems with the theory of herd immunity. First, immunity from COVID infection tends to wane over time rather than become permanent. In addition, infection with one variant of the virus does not necessarily confer immunity from other variants, of which there were many.

Another concern is that COVID can be a devastating disease for victims of any age. Allowing someone to become infected can lead to serious health problems.

What’s more, the prospect that COVID can be beaten by natural expansion of herd immunity has convinced many people not to bother with proven countermeasures, including social distancing, mask-wearing, and vaccinations.

Today, more than three years after the first appearance of COVID, the US still has not achieved herd immunity, although it is getting closer to the goal. according to Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. The trajectory of the disease was catastrophic – the US death toll is 1.13 million.hundreds of children have died and it is estimated that 245,000 children have lost one or both parents to COVID. V USA leads the world in cases of death from COVID; its death rate of 3.478 per million population is worse than that of the UK, Spain, France, the Nordic countries, Canada, and Israel.

Some herd immunity advocates have offered their buoyant predictions in a misguided, if not dishonest, attempt to reassure the American public. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, in March 2020 urged HHS officials to speak out against the lockdowns on the grounds that they “inciting irrational fear” a virus that he estimates will kill about 10,000 people. “The panic needs to stop,” Atlas wrote.

Atlas soon became Trump’s top adviser, promoting herd immunity in the White House over the objections of more experienced advisers like Dr. Jones. Deborah Birks.

Howard is particularly concerned about how the politicization of the pandemic has allowed fringe ideas to infiltrate public health policy.

“In 2019, you would be considered a charlatan if you assumed that the best way to get rid of the virus is to spread the virus,” he says. “But it became mainstream and influenced politicians at the highest level.”

In his book, Howard treats propagandists with the deepest contempt. “The Great Barrington Declaration” the Herd Immunity Manifesto, published in October 2020 and originally signed by Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya; Martin Kuhldorf, then from Harvard; and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford. (Thousands of other academics and scientists would later add their signatures.)

The essence of the declaration was to counter blocking. Its solution was what its drafters called “targeted protection,” which meant giving “those at the lowest risk of death a normal life to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those most at risk.” . are mostly retirees.

The declaration states that older people living at home should be separated from other family members, except when meeting them on the street, and “should deliver groceries and other essentials to the home.”

Targeted protection, the promoters wrote, would allow society to achieve herd immunity and return to normal life in three to six months.

As Howard documents, the declaration was nothing more than a libertarian fantasy. Perhaps this was not surprising, because one of its organizers was an arch-libertarian named Jeffrey Tucker.

To get an idea of ​​Tucker’s worldview, consider a 2016 article titled “Let the kids work.” There he ridiculed the Washington Post for publishing photo gallery of working children 100 years ago, including miners and sweatshops as young as 10.

Tucker replied that these kids were “working in the adult world, surrounded by cool, fussy things and new technologies. They are on the streets, in factories, in mines, with adults and with peers, they study and do. They are valued for what they do, that is, they are valued as people … Whatever you say about it, it’s an exciting life.

At least a better life than “forced into government tanks for a whole decade” – that is, go to school.

The authors of the declaration, writes Howard, never specified how to achieve their goals. Delivering food and supplies to millions of housebound seniors? In an interview with the Hoover Institution, Bhattacharya said, “We could offer free DoorDash to the elderly.”

As Howard observes, Bhattacharya was surprisingly optimistic about “creating a program to deliver fresh food to tens of millions of elderly people for several consecutive months across the country.”

Hand-waving like this solved the problems of multi-generational households that house millions of vulnerable older people. The authors of the declaration wrote that elderly family members “may temporarily live with an older friend or sibling, with whom they can self-isolate together in the midst of community spread of infection.” As a last resort, vacant hotel rooms can be used for temporary housing.”

Of course, hermetically isolating tens of millions of “invulnerable” people from tens of millions of vulnerable people in a few weeks would be “the single greatest logistical challenge that mankind has ever faced,” notes Howard. “Nowhere in the world has targeted protection been used to achieve herd immunity in three to six months, as promised by the Great Barrington Declaration.”

The Declaration did indeed promote complacency. Its compilers, says Howard, were “people with no real responsibility for anything, which made the impossible seem very simple. The task of delivering food to the homes of the elderly was left to health authorities that were understaffed, overburdened and underfunded.”

What may be the most unforgivable element of the herd immunity movement is that children can be used as shields for the rest of the population. Its proponents advised against vaccinating young children on the grounds that their susceptibility to the virus was minimal or even non-existent so they could safely acquire immunity naturally – and possibly as Vinay Prasad of UC San Francisco impliesprovide increased immunity for adults in their families.

However, while children tend to experience fewer symptoms when they are infected, they are not immune. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 1600 American children under the age of 18 died from COVID during the pandemic.

In any case, death is not the only serious outcome from COVID. CDC says more than 14,000 children were hospitalized for COVID during a pandemic. Countless children may suffer long-term COVID or other lifelong manifestations of the disease. Howard said doctors advise deliberately infecting children with COVID when a vaccine is available, especially if the goal is to protect adults. Hey right.

In a science-driven world, the proponents of the failed herd immunity theory would have long lost their credibility and their public soap box.

The opposite happened. Bhattacharya and Kulldorf still have their platforms (Kuldorf is now affiliated with right-wing Hillsdale College). Both were nominated in December by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president. “Committee on Public Health Integrity” accused of questioning federal public health policy.

Meanwhile, Scott Atlas was scheduled to give the commencement address at New College of Florida, the once-famous liberal arts institution that DeSantis has turned into a right-wing pedagogy paradise. He was met with exclamations from the audience of high school graduateshowever, indicates that America’s youth may not be as easily deceived as their parents.

At the moment, right-wing anti-science ideology seems to be on the rise. The COVID vaccine agitation is metastasizing into an opposition movement against all childhood vaccinations, a trend that threatens to spark a surge in other vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles and polio.

“The anti-vaccine movement saw an opportunity to sow doubt,” Howard told me. “Getting rid of all school vaccination regulations has always been the Holy Grail for them.”

Howard’s book is a warning. We may be on the brink of a public health disaster because the proponents of the failed theory that COVID can be fought with “natural immunity” without vaccines have been able to take on the mantle of truth-tellers. But it’s not.

If you live in the US you probably use Fahrenheit, but most other places in the world use Celsius. Both were invented in the early to mid-18th century by European scientists, a Dutch physicist and inventor. Daniel Fahrenheit and Swedish astronomer Various centigrade.

The two scales differ in several ways. First, the freezing and boiling points of water are different. In Fahrenheit, water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212 degrees, while in Celsius, water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100 degrees. Since there are 180 degrees between freezing and boiling in Fahrenheit and only 100 degrees in Celsius, each degree is 1.8 times more Celsius than Fahrenheit.

Here’s how to easily convert between the two scales:

It is important to know that for every degree Celsius there is 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (or 9/5 of a degree as a fraction).

Since the two scales start with different numbers, zero and 32, the conversion between them involves adding or subtracting 32.

To convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, multiply the Celsius temperature by 1.8 and then add 32. You can use this formula:

F = (1.8 x C) + 32

If you want to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius, subtract 32 from the Fahrenheit temperature and then divide the result by 1.8 using the following formula:

C \u003d (F – 32) ÷ 1.8

So (1.8 x -40°C) + 32 = -40°F.

This works the other way too. (-40F − 32) ÷ 1.8 = -40C

So why is this? Both scales must converge somewhere, and minus 40 degrees is just right. If you want to know the mathematical reason, keep reading.