06.13.25

Herd mentality

One of the eight people Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has appointed to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices—after he fired the old committee—is Dr. Martin Kulldorff, identifed by CNN as “a biostatistician and epidemiologist who co-authored an October 2020 strategy on herd immunity known as the Great Barrington Declaration.”

That’s all CNN said about the Great Barrington Declaration. There is more to say.

As you may remember, in the spring of 2020, a month into the pandemic, a false debate arose between safeguarding lives and safeguarding the S&P 500. The capitalist class quickly opted for the latter. “Neither mitigation nor waiting for a vaccine is acceptable given the magnitude of the problem we are facing,” wrote Douglas A. Perednia, a retired dermatologist, in The Federalist in mid-March. “Economies are like a living organism—as soon as their normal functions are shut down, they begin to die.” The metaphor was striking, given that it was a brisk description of what happens to a person infected with COVID-19. Oxygen deprivation and blood clots cause rapid damage to the organs. Normal functions shut down. The patient begins to die.

Under the assumption that rescuing the economy and restoring individual liberty would unfortunately require human sacrifice, Perednia proffered a modest proposal, minus the Swiftian satire. Young healthy adults should step forward for “controlled voluntary infection,” or CVI, like kindergarteners exposed to chickenpox at “pox parties.” Upon recovering, these adults would become Covid-immune workers, go back to their jobs, revive the economy, and in the meantime build herd immunity to the coronavirus.

Or they might die.

But, as Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a fanatical defender of the pre-born, said while proposing that the elderly and infirm rather than young and healthy volunteer to contract the disease (and maybe die), “There are more important things than living.”

Scientists managed to dissuade anyone from trying the herd immunity strategy for a while. Then in August, Trump hired a big supporter to be his new pandemic advisor: Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist, fellow at the conservative Hoover Institute, and, as the Washington Post reported, “the self-styled anti-Dr. Fauci.”

Atlas was partial to the GBD and to what it called the “most compassionate” (and cost-effective) approach: End lock-downs, protect the vulnerable, and let the more resilient get sick—and immune—by “natural infection.” The signers—who claimed to number 9,000, though most were anonymous—estimated that herd immunity could be reached at infection rates of 20 to 25 percent.

World-renowned infectious diseases expert Michael Osterholm called the figure “the most amazing combination of pixie dust and pseudoscience I’ve ever seen.” Scientific consensus puts the percentage closer to 90 percent. Within the week, hundreds of scientists denounced the Great Barrington Declaration. On a campaign staff call, Trump groused that “people are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots.”

What were the human costs of what the president called “going herd,” a phrase that brought to mind other high-casualty depravity, like “going postal”? In the Biopolitical Times, Pete Shanks did the math. “To achieve herd immunity in the US without a vaccine, we would need at least 200 million Americans to get sick and recover.” Given Covid-related mortality rates at the time, that translated to one to two million deaths. At that point, “[w]e’re not so much talking about building herd immunity as culling the herd,” wrote Shanks.

The other main author of the Great Barrington Declaration, by the way, was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. He is now director of the National Institutes of Health.