President Trump is yet again making news for another bizarre claim about the pandemic, this time borne of a malapropism.
During a town hall interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Trump claimed once again that the virus will "dispappear," but this time, we'll do it with the power of our minds: via a "herd mentality."
You can't make this stuff up.
Of course, the President presumably meant "herd immunity."
Sadly, that doesn't make his statements make all that much more sense.
Trump claimed, once again without evidence, that with time, the virus will simply "disappear." When pressed by Stephanopoulos whether that would require a vaccine, the President clarified that it will be faster with a vaccine, but either way, it's going to disappear.
Trump elaborated on his claim.
"With time it goes away... You'll develop, you'll develop herd–like a herd mentality. It's going to be, it's going to be herd-developed, and that's going to happen. That will all happen. But with a vaccine, I think it will go away very quickly."
Even if the President meant to say "herd immunity," however, he is woefully off-base with the facts.
Herd immunity, the idea that over time, a virus will infect enough people or animals that it runs out of hosts, has been shown with multiple diseases—including the current virus being battled around the world—to be a woefully ineffective way of fighting a virus if saving lives is the goal.
We even have a present-day case study from which to learn. Sweden adopted herd immunity as its strategy to fight the pandemic, never imposing lockdowns. It ended up with far more deaths than countries that did impose lockdowns and other social-distancing procedures.
On Twitter, Trump was thoroughly roasted for the dangerous ignorance of his comments.
And some couldn't help but point out how apropos Trump's seeming Freudian slip was.
Notably, Trump's own advisor for the pandemic Dr. Anthony Fauci has repeatedly dismissed herd immunity as an appropriate way of fighting the pandemic, mainly because the science indicates it is likely to result in up to three million deaths in 12 months.
