Donald Trump's Final Pitch to Americans: Drop Dead
With 20 days to go until the presidential election, Donald Trump’s prospects are not looking great. As of last week, Joe Biden was leading the president by an average of 9.7 points nationally and five to seven points in major battleground states. Biden has a much higher favorability rate than Hillary Clinton did this late in the race. The president is down in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the states to which he owes his 2016 win. He’s hemorrhaging support from women (which might have something to do with the fact that one of his campaign advisers called one of the most prominent women in America a “power-hungry, smug bitch”). Seniors, who were essential to his political fortune four years ago, have been souring on him. And on arguably the biggest issue of the day—COVID-19—two thirds of Americans think Trump has done a terrible job.
Against this backdrop, one might think that Trump would spend the next two and a half weeks swearing to voters that he’s finally taking the pandemic seriously and that he’s got a plan to tackle this thing, even if it means something like a national mask mandate, a move that experts say could stop the virus in its tracks in four to eight weeks. Instead he’s got a slightly different plan: ignore the whole thing and let nature take its course, i.e. trust in herd immunity, which could require some 2 million Americans to die. Per the New York Times:
The White House has embraced a declaration by a group of scientists arguing that authorities should allow the coronavirus to spread among young healthy people while protecting the elderly and the vulnerable—an approach that would rely on arriving at “herd immunity” through infections rather than a vaccine. Many experts say “herd immunity”—the point at which a disease stops spreading because nearly everyone in a population has contracted it—is still very far-off. Leading experts have concluded, using different scientific methods, that about 85 to 90% of the American population is still susceptible to the coronavirus.
On a call convened Monday by the White House, two senior administration officials, both speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to give their names, cited an October 4 petition titled The Great Barrington Declaration, which argues against lockdowns and calls for a reopening of businesses and schools.... Its lead authors include Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at Stanford University, the academic home of Dr. Scott Atlas, President Trump’s science adviser. Dr. Atlas has also espoused herd immunity. The declaration’s architects include Sunetra Gupta and Gabriela Gomes, two scientists who have proposed that societies may achieve herd immunity when 10 to 20% of their populations have been infected with the virus, a position most epidemiologists disagree with.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/donald-trump-coronavirus-plan
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