An outside the box solution
More on the Federalist’s “let’s let the young people get C19 in hopes of herd immunity”:
Twitter temporarily locked the account of The Federalist Wednesday after the conservative opinion site published a piece, written by a dermatologist based in Oregon, that proposed the deliberate spread of the coronavirus in order to boost immunity to the disease.
The op-ed, penned by Dr. Douglas Perednia, proposed an “outside the box” solution to the current pandemic that flies in the face of advice from experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, who are urging social distancing.
…
“It is time to think outside the box and seriously consider a somewhat unconventional approach to COVID-19: controlled voluntary infection,” The Federalist wrote in a now-removed tweet linking to the op-ed.
That’s a pull-quote from the article. That’s not a thought experiment, it’s a “let’s consider this” suggestion. Saying let’s consider is a step removed from “let’s do” but it’s not as far removed as a thought experiment. Thought experiments are just that, they’re not suggestions to consider doing a thing.
Twitter initially added a warning to the link stating that the post might be “unsafe.”
Then, according to a Twitter spokesperson, “the account was temporarily locked for violating the Twitter Rules regarding COVID-19.”
It’s great that Twitter could find a few seconds to spare from locking the accounts of women who say that men are not women, in order to lock the account of someone saying we should consider deliberately spreading COVID-19.
The tweet was deleted, and the Federalist Twitter page appears to be back up and running. Twitter has taken aggressive measures to crack down on misinformation surrounding the coronavirus.
Federalist co-founders Sean Davis and Ben Domenech did not respond to Mediaite’s request for comment.
Probably too busy talking to Sean Hannity.
How utterly absurd. One cannot “control” this infection. If that were possible, people wouldn’t be ordered to maintain distance and to stay at home.
You mean, they would be like my work, where people are expected to continue to report for their full shifts? But if they are in a “high risk” category, and can work from home, they may be permitted to do so? Our local paper pointed out this morning that ours is the only school in the state that has not closed. We always pride ourselves at being “on the cutting edge” (though we rarely are, and then when we are, it causes much bleeding before we can get the wound staunched because we rushed in where angels fear to tread); I suppose we will be on the cutting edge of COVID-19 deaths soon.
Oh dear god you’re the only one in the state that hasn’t closed? That’s got to feel intolerable.
I wish the governor would extend his four county closure to the rest of the state. Just because most of our cases are in Omaha and Lincoln…but we don’t even know that. Seemingly healthy people could be walking around infecting everyone. Good old lock on the barn door. The horse is gone.
What is “controlled voluntary infection” ? How would it be different from the vaccine trials now going on?
I thought the way a vaccine works is by provoking our immune system to respond to a new threat by letting it taste the new threat. Only a scaled down version of the new threat would be introduced so immune system can still develop a response while the patient can still survive and push the virus out.