Dr. Scott Atlas, who joined the White House’s pandemic response team in mid-August, has denied a report that he is pushing the so-called “herd immunity” strategy of handling the coronavirus.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, herd immunity is “a situation in which a sufficient proportion of a population is immune to an infectious disease (through vaccination and/or prior illness) to make its spread from person to person unlikely. Even individuals not vaccinated (such as newborns and those with chronic illnesses) are offered some protection because the disease has little opportunity to spread within the community.”
The Washington Post, citing five unnamed sources, reported on Monday that Atlas was pushing President Donald Trump to consider the strategy to bring the coronavirus infectivity rates down to manageable levels and avoid large spikes, such as what was seen in New York and New Jersey in early summer.
“There is no policy of the President or this administration of achieving herd immunity. There never has been any such policy recommended to the President or to anyone else from me. That’s a lie,” Atlas told The Washington Post after the report was published.
White House communications director Alyssa Farah also denied the report.
“President Trump is fully focused on defeating the virus through therapeutics and ultimately a vaccine. There is no discussion about changing our strategy,” Farah said in a statement. “We have initiated an unprecedented effort under Operation Warp Speed to safely bring a vaccine to market in record time — ending this virus through medicine is our top focus.”
Sweden is the most prominent adopter of the strategy and has been criticized for its relatively high death rate. Sweden’s rate of new infections has slowed markedly, however, and the country is considering backing off already lax rules put in place because of the pandemic. Countries such as France, Spain, and portions of eastern Europe are seeing bumps or surges in coronavirus cases.
Atlas has long been a critic of the strict lockdown policy embraced by many states in the U.S. The approach is a blunt policy instrument with severe economic consequences that has contributed significantly to the tens of millions of Americans put out of work because of the pandemic.
In May, Atlas co-wrote an op-ed arguing that the cost of locking down large parts of American society has already far exceeded the toll of the virus.
“The disease has been responsible for 800,000 lost years of life so far,” Atlas and other researchers wrote. “Considering only the losses of life from missed health care and unemployment due solely to the lockdown policy, we conservatively estimate that the national lockdown is responsible for at least 700,000 lost years of life every month, or about 1.5 million so far — already far surpassing the COVID-19 total.”
Some public health experts reacted with alarm to The Washington Post report. New York University professor Paul Romer said, “The administration faces some pretty serious hurdles in making this argument. One is a lot of people will die, even if you can protect people in nursing homes.”