Culling the herd

The nonsense that Donald Trump and his regime have been saying and doing—or, more accurately failing to do—regarding the coronavirus pandemic is finally beginning to make a macabre sort of sense.

The mass media is widely publishing reports that “herd immunity” is the latest strategy the White House is considering in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. The fact that all this reporting misses is that herd immunity has been the de facto approach of the Trump administration to Covid-19 from the beginning. Trump has never had a plan to confront and crush Covid-19, not just because he is feckless leader, which he is, but perhaps more importantly because herd immunity is not about fighting to defeat the virus but about letting it spread so widely that it eventually runs out of people who have never been infected and thus have not developed antibodies against the disease.

Granted, the reality of the matter was easy to miss for several reasons. The fog of ideological, class and ethnic war waged by this administration—always and on every issue—confounds and disorients journalists in nominally democratic states. It takes a while for American mainstream media to begin to see through it, and then usually through a glass darkly.

Skepticism is a feature of the mainstream media mindset in the United States, but the habit of radical, systematic disbelief in every official story—the assumption that the state’s default is to lie, distort and dissemble—is acquired naturally only by dissident reporters in authoritarian states like Russia, Belarus, and the Philippines, and by rare American radical journalists like the late, great I.F. Stone.

Even after so many lies that Trump has become a full-employment agency for fact checkers, much of the media still gives the president the benefit of the doubt, at least initially. They must, apparently, because all the networks are subsidiaries of huge corporate conglomerates the material interests of which someone as vindictive as Trump could hurt more grievously than he has already been doing through verbal assaults. That’s why, while many journalists know that the automatic reaction to anything that Trump says should be a Bronx cheer, few if any go there.

Stepping back from the chaotic style, the bombastic rhetoric and the cruel and failed policies of this administration—apparently ever ever-changing but in reality gyrating along a single axis—you can see that the U.S. approach is virtually a mirror image of Sweden’s, herd immunity, with the same horrible results measured by extremely high by case and death rates.

The difference is that Sweden has been open and honest about adopting its terrible policy why the United States has not. If the result of the herd immunity policy in Sweden has been nothing short of disastrous, the consequences in the United States are bound to be catastrophic. Sweden has free universal health and an impressive public health infrastructure. The United States has neither.

The United States had some assets that exceeded Sweden’s in some respects. Before Trump began to politicize them, the elite federal health agencies in this country—the CDC and the NIH– were the global gold standard. As if to prove the thesis of a book that holds that everything that Trump touches dies, today the experts in public health and epidemiology take what these agencies say with more than a grain of salt.

This follows a familiar Trump modus operandi. He has tried to delegitimize the U.S. institutions with the most global credibility, including the Federal Reserve, the press, and the electoral system. Ironically even the Voice of America, created as a U.S. propaganda agency during the Cold War, has had the reasonable level of credibility it built-up over the years by adopting standards of objectivity has been undermined by Trump, who fired everyone and replaced them with propagandists. The White House has gone as far as denying the VOA permission to interview Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading epidemiologist.

The Trump administration’s reason to obfuscate given what they are doing has a logic as impeccable as the infrastructure of the death camps. Herd immunity—allowing the virus to spread among the younger and presumably healthier sector of the population until a threshold is reached in which a sufficient number of people are infected and develop immunity so that the virus encounters ever-fewer people to infect and begins to fade—is a design for mass death even in Sweden. In the United States it is a formula for a singular tragedy in a country that has experienced more than its share.

Sweden’s policy is bad, but Sweden lacks many of the nasty features, like systemic racism and enormous inequality, that make the situation in the United States that much worse. Systemic racism in the United States is having a huge impact on the odds of living or dying in the pandemic. Much of the dying in the United States befalls the Latino, Black and Native American minorities. This part is well known. What follows, not so much.

First, one of the main reasons this country alone, among the rich countries, does not have a universal health care is racial. Too many whites in this country do not want to spend any of “their hard-earned money” on health care for what they see as a shiftless and dangerous underclass. Lack of access to free health care is one of the reasons for the disproportionate racial toll of the virus.

Second, the economically and occupationally disadvantaged position of Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans means many cannot afford the extremely high cost of private health insurance. Moreover, they tend to hold jobs in which employers generally do not provide it. Thus, minorities may hesitate in seeking medical care until it is too late.

Third, Blacks and Latinos are a disproportionately high percentage of “essential workers” (read disposable people) who take great risks for low pay. They get paid peanuts and in return they help keep the middle class at home and safe.

Fourth, as British imperial officials in the 19th century saw the potato famine as a blessing that would serve to reduce the Irish population, Trump administration officials purportedly urged a slow motion response when the pandemic was affecting the Democratic and heavily minority populations on the East and West coasts. “Those are not our voters,” one official was quoted as saying.

Massive voter suppression, which Trump is attempting to do, especially by interfering with the postal service, is one of the few avenues toward a Trump reelection. An uncontrolled pandemic that decimates minority populations is even more effective and final.