Corona parties

Thumbing their noses at both government directives and the coronavirus, right-wing protesters have been massing at state capitols in Michigan, Minnesota, Virginia, and Texas to demand the lifting of stay-at-home orders issued by Democratic governors. President Donald Trump has responded in a way that looks a whole lot like a call to insurrection.

On April 17, Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” and ‘LIBERATE VIRGINIA,” apparently mistaking those states for Paris in 1944.

Trump and the Republican Party have been pushing to reopen the American economy immediately, if not sooner, and screw the cost in human lives. This attitude goes a long way toward explaining an article The Federalist ran on March 25.

If you didn’t already know that The Federalist is a right-wing website, you would have after you saw the article’s title: “How ‘Chickenpox Parties’ Could Turn the Tide of the Wuhan Virus.” The author, Dr Douglas A Perednia, a retired dermatologist – not a specialist in infectious diseases – makes the standard right-wing talking point that we can’t stay in our homes forever while the US economy crumbles. He adds that we don’t yet have a vaccine that would prevent infection with Covid-19; nor do we have an effective treatment for the virus once contracted. He declares: “It is time to think outside the box and seriously consider a somewhat unconventional approach to COVID-19: controlled voluntary infection.”

Unconventional is one way to put it. Controlled voluntary infection (CVI), explains Dr Perednia, “involves allowing people at low risk for severe complications to deliberately contract Covid-19 in a socially and medically responsible way so they become immune to the disease. People who are immune cannot pass on the disease to others.”

Who would voluntarily submit to infection with Covid-19? President Donald Trump has an answer: journalists. According to Vanity Fair: “Trump told aides he’s afraid journalists will try to purposefully contract coronavirus to give it to him on Air Force One, a person close to the administration told me.”

Dr Perednia isn’t thinking of infecting journalists. Dr Perednia wants to recruit his corps of volunteer guinea pigs from a different group: young people under age 20. Why? Because of herd immunity.

Dr Perednia explains herd immunity as “the phenomenon whereby contagious infections can no longer spread if a large enough percentage of the population is immune to the disease, and CVI is a means to achieve it.” This phenomenon is real. Dr Perednia proposes that persons under 20 volunteer to be infected with the coronavirus as they are the demographic with the lowest risk of dying from COVID-19.

Excerpted from: 'We Won’t Stop COVID-19 with “Chickenpox Parties”

Counterpunch.org