Who needs a vaccine when you can just get the disease

On March 12th, Boris Johnson gave a historic address to the British nation. Facing the greatest national threat since World War II, he had this to offer:

Even though large tracts of Asia and many old and famous States have fought the grip of the Coronavirus, we shall flag and fail. We shall stop now. We shall give up on testing, we shall give up on closing events, we shall give up on fighting this disease at all, because it would cost too much. So we shall surrender on the streets, we shall surrender in the fields; we surrender.

I’m paraphrasing, but that’s basically it.

While Johnson paid lip service to flattening the curve (spreading out the epidemic by fighting it) that is expressly what they’re not doing, because they’ve stopped fighting it. To fight something you have to see it, and the UK has now given up on community testing.

“You can’t fight a virus if you don’t know where it is,” the WHO’s director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said at a briefing on Friday. “Find, isolate, test and treat every case to break the chains of Covid transmission. Every case we find and treat limits the expansion of the disease.”

This is precisely what the UK is not doing, and the WHO has unusually criticized them directly. They have surrendered, putting the whole world at risk. The UK now only tests hospital admissions, so just the most obvious cases. They are doing nothing to stop community spread which is what creates the deadly peak.

Hence while the UK now reports low numbers, these numbers are completely unreliable. In fact, the UK is actively working against everyone else in the world, because their government wants to incubate the virus in a human population, on purpose. Listen to the UK’s chief scientist Patrick Vallance:

“If you suppress something very, very hard, when you release those measures it bounces back and it bounces back at the wrong time,” he said. The government is concerned that if not enough people catch the virus now, it will re-emerge in the winter, when the NHS is already overstretched.

This is a bit like saying ‘if you fight the Nazis too hard they’ll just bounce back. Let’s let them just let them win until the weather’s better.’ This is the United Kingdom in 2020. I’m sure Churchill is spitting in hell.

Read that quote again. Everyone in the world is trying to prevent their citizens from getting infected. The UK is concerned that not enough people will catch the virus now. It’s absolutely shocking. This is what the Editor-In-Chief of the Lancet had to say:

The UK government — Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson — claim they are following the science. But that is not true. The evidence is clear. We need urgent implementation of social distancing and closure policies. The government is playing roulette with the public. This is a major error.

The only action in Boris Johnson’s speech is for elderly people to not take cruises, students to not take international trips, and everyone to wash their hands. After the speech, they finally banned mass gatherings after most events banned themselves. That’s it. They’re not fighting coronavirus. The UK has surrendered.

The UK’s plan is for everyone to get the disease. They are planning on what everyone else calls failure.

To reach herd immunity, about 60% of the population would need to get ill and become immune, according to Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser. Though it could need as much as 70% or more. Even scientists who understand the strategy are anxious. (The Guardian)

This is a perverse misunderstanding of herd immunity. Herd immunity is when enough people get vaccinated that a disease can’t spread. It’s not giving everyone the damn disease. That isn’t herd immunity. It’s just culling the herd. Don’t take my word for it, Boris Johnson’s old newspaper just comes out and says it.

Let’s say for a minute you’re alright with killing Nan. Fuck you, and that’s not even what’s going to happen. Yes, the death rate is highest for the elderly, but young people also die at many times the rate of the flu. For someone my age (37) for example, it’s nearly 20x deadlier.

Furthermore, the giant peak created by community spread will overwhelm the health system and increase the death rate from all sorts of things. Not only from coronavirus, but from every person who might need an ICU bed and won’t get it.

It’s like the UK government looked at the carnage in Italy and said ‘that’s great, I’ll have that’. Everyone else is mobilizing every resource and sacrificing everything to avoid that fate. The UK is planning on it.

Dominic Cummins and whoever spitballed this ‘out of the box’ idea is trying to protect their economy with no understanding of what an economy is. An economy is people. It’s like letting your house burn because you want to buy a painting. Where are you going to hang the painting without a house?

But this is the plan. Literally, and I’m not exaggerating, let everyone get coronavirus, the more the better. The UK’s response to the greatest challenge of its generation is to do nothing. To keep calm and let coronavirus carry on.

As Churchill never said, “You look tough Hitler, come on in.”