All we are saying is give “herd immunity” a chance

A letter published by the Washington Post:

Regarding Tom Frieden’s Oct. 19 op-ed, “Pursuing ‘herd immunity’ is the reckless, dead-wrong solution”:

Roughly 90 percent of all novel coronavirus deaths will occur in those 60 years of age and older. Equally roughly 90 percent of the virus’s social and economic consequences will be paid by those younger than 60. That presents us with an intergenerational conflict of monstrous proportions.

In this respect, and though of course I do not propose a reckless “pursuit” of “herd immunity,” especially by we elders, I hold that if there’s a small chance there could be such a thing out there, and if effective and abundant vaccines are not guaranteed to appear in a very short term, we have no right to stand in the way of it finding us. Doing so would be, and I feel it already is, a shameful violation of that holy intergenerational social contract Edmund Burke spoke about.

PS. If John Lennon had still been alive, he would have been 80, and I’m sure he would agree with the title of this post

PS. July 27, 2020, I had tweeted: “Sweden kept all schools until 9th grade open. Parents of children in 9th grade are almost always less than 50 years of age. In Sweden, as of July 24, out of 5,687 Coronavirus deaths 71, 1.2%, were younger than 50 years.

Conclusion: Keep schools open, keep older teachers at home and have grandparents refrain from hugging their grandchildren. Disseminating data on COVID-19 without discriminating by age, is in essence misinformation.”

PS. March 22, 2021 I tweeted: Georges Clemenceau’s “War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men” could be updated to: “A Covid-19 response ‘is too serious a matter to entrust’ to epidemiologists”

PS. Let us not forget that while searching for herd immunity, some might also be fighting the herd-docility some few want to impose on all of us.

PS. The Supreme Court, the Legislative, the Executive, top military & other prominent Americans, during the State of the Union, wore no masks. In the supermarket, days after, over 90% there, me included, wore masks. Seems Herd Docility is stronger than Herd Immunity :-(

            Winston Churchill on herd immunity? 

On schools in Covid-19 times

Financial and other escape valve in times of Covid-19

Researchers found that the death rate among more than 5,000 Covid-19 patients in the system’s three hospitals, dropped from 25.6 percent in March to 7.6 percent in August.

PS. ChatGPT: Is informing about the mortality rate of a virus without discriminating it by age misinformation?

Should we not know to whom we are kicking the public-debt-can down the road?

With respect to that congressional authorization for U.S. military operations against U.S. enemies, Senator Elizabeth Warren, very correctly, recently tweeted: 

“Congress owes our troops & their families a full debate to authorize the use of military force before we send them into harm’s way.”

But in the same vein each time an increase of public debt is authorized, or the public-debt-can is kicked further down the road, OMB, or CBO should prepare a detailed report on who are expected to serve that debt.

Because let’s face it, public debt is, before anything, if it is going to be duly served, an anticipation of tax revenues to come... and future taxpayers might like to be informed of that.

To have in black and white that we might be asking our grandchildren to pay for some of our current societal requests, might be a good way to better live up to that intergenerational social contract Edmund Burke spoke about.

We should continuously remind ourselves of that the possibility of contracting debt at reasonable rates, is a strategic asset, which no one has the right to take away from future generations, without a truly overwhelming reason