Donald Trump’s new pandemic adviser is pushing a “herd immunity” approach to the coronavirus—a stance has concerned health experts and underscored White House officials’ use of the coronavirus crisis to win political influence. The Washington Post reports that Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who was brought on to advise Trump on COVID-19 earlier this month, is spearheading the herd immunity approach, which involves lifting restrictions on social and business interactions to spread the virus through most of the population, protecting the vulnerable while the healthy build up resistance to the disease.
Atlas “does not have a background in infectious diseases or epidemiology” and was reportedly hired “to argue an alternative point of view” from Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, two central members of the White House coronavirus task force “whom the president has grown increasingly annoyed with for public comments that he believes contradict his own assertions that the threat of the virus is receding.” Atlas apparently caught Trump’s attention as a regular on Fox News, where he has appeared 20 times since the end of April to voice unproven claims and incorrect predictions, many of which support Trump’s insistence on a return to normalcy. Atlas reportedly meets with Trump on a near-daily basis, more than any other health official, and is “advocating policies that appeal to Trump’s desire to move past the pandemic and get the economy going.”
The idea behind herd immunity is that enough people become immune to COVID-19—either through mass vaccination or prior infection—that the disease slows its spread. But scientists are still racing to answer questions that make this strategy untenable, like how long immunity lasts and who is most vulnerable to infection. It’s also unclear how much of the population would need to be infected to achieve herd immunity, though the Post notes it may necessitate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths. Atlas has argued that the herd immunity approach would not lead to more deaths if the vulnerable are protected and said, in a July appearance on Fox News, “When younger, healthier people get the disease, they don’t have a problem with the disease. I’m not sure why that’s so difficult for everyone to acknowledge.” Infectious-disease experts contest both claims: more than 25,000 people younger than 65 have died of the virus in the United States, per the Post, and the high rate of obesity and heart disease in the U.S. means more people overall are vulnerable to it. Not to mention Atlas and Trump are pushing for a return to schools, which could put older people who don’t live in nursing homes at risk.
The administration has already started to embrace policies in line with Atlas’s approach, as evidenced by the abrupt change in CDC testing guidelines last week that undercuts the risk posed by asymptomatic carriers, a decision reportedly made while Fauci was undergoing surgery. Fauci told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta that he “was under general anesthesia in the operating room and was not part of any discussion or deliberation regarding the new testing recommendations,” which suggest people without symptoms may not need to be tested, even if they’ve been in close contact with an infected individual. “I am concerned about the interpretation of these recommendations and worried it will give people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern,” Fauci said. “In fact it is.” (Brett Giroir, the official overseeing coronavirus testing efforts, told reporters that Fauci had signed off on the guidelines “before it even got to the task force level.”)