Ask A Genius 570 – Footnotes to Mass Death
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/13
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why is America so beholden to herd immunity right now, so much of America, just idea?
Rick Rosner: It’s Trump’s latest idea. He’s losing badly in the polls. His brain is full of steroids. He’s just crazy. Aapparently, he’s got an idiot in charge of this. The guy is not an epidemiologist. He’s a radiologist. I think he’s been disavowed by the school he works at. Anyway, somehow, they’ve decided that America should just go for herd immunity, which is having enough people who’ve gotten the virus, they can’t get it anymore. So if maybe 75% of the population has had it, then it’ll be harder to pass it on to the remaining 25%. Because it has to go from person to person, and if three quarters of the people you encounter. You can’t, infect, because they’ve already been infected and then recovered, then might be enough to have it to extinguish it in the general population.
Jacobsen: How many people will die in such a scenario by the time that happens?
Rosner: Now we do the math.
Jacobsen: OK, do the math Mr. Math.
Rosner: All right. So in America, we have 8 million confirmed cases out of about 330 million people round that up to 10 million or more to include cases that just didn’t get caught because we’re bad at test. So we’re at about 3% of the population having it now or having recovered from it. That means we have to multiply that by about 25 to get to 75%. And then if you multiply the number of dead so far by 25, you get more than 5 million dead, which would be an unprecedented catastrophe in American history, where the most deadly incidents in history, are the Civil War, the Spanish Flu, AIDS if you want to throw that in there, which killed about two thirds of a million people. So you’re talking killing more than seven times as many Americans as the deadliest other thing, killing more people than the top 10 deadliest events in American history combined.
Even if you optimistically say that the mortality, we can get it down to 1% among people who catch it because we have more drugs to treat it with now. That still means 1% of 320 million Americans still means over three million dead Americans, which is, again, five times the worst thing in American history. It’s not genocide, but it’s death on a genocidal scale. Hitler famously killed 6 million Jews and another 5 million other people he sent to their deaths in the camps. And we’re killing, if we want for herd immunity, we’d be killing at least half as many of that as Hitler’s 6 million, which would make Trump a criminal on Hitler’s scale. He’s already done his shitty job on Covid, which has already killed at least 220,000 Americans and probably closer to 300,000. So, he’s already 5% of his way to Hitler and the Jews. He’s already one of the worst killers in US history. And going for herd immunity, it would multiply his incompetence and his crime at least tenfold.
Jacobsen: Are there any other comparable people than Hitler for this, for instance, Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, those individuals who are typically associated to mass murder?
Rosner: Okay, so, if you add up all the deaths that you can attribute to Hitler, which was pretty much the European theater in World War Two. I’ve heard estimates of 30 million, including all the soldiers killed on both sides and all the civilians killed. So, 30 million for Hitler. 40 million for Stalin. 50 million for Mao in China. I don’t know how many Pol Pot killed, probably on the scale of a million or two I don’t know. But yes, Trump is in the six figures for the shit he’s done with just Covid. By the time his four years are up, three quarters of a million more Americans will have died under Trump than under any other president in four years. Only one third of the three quarters of a million more people who’ve died under Trump have died just due to America being bigger now than it has been in the past. So half a million people are dying from.
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