Health Care/Joan Retsinas

The Great Barrington Declaration Meets Eugenics

Yikes! Politicians come, and, I hope, go; but ideas, once planted, linger like the kudzu gardeners struggle to eradicate. One day — you have dug them all out. A week later, their buds sprout.

Think of the resurgence of enthusiasm for neoNazis, for fascism, for “social Darwinism.” We may no longer recall their intellectual protagonists, but their ideas linger.

Today, two ideas have melded to threaten the fabric of our nation.

The first — The Great Barrington Declaration — sounds like the title of a John LeCarre thriller, outlining a plot against the United States. The Declaration is a proposal by three university professors with backgrounds in epidemiology, who in early October met at the headquarters of a free-market think tank called the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Mass. They propose what they call Focused Protection as the best way to handle COVID-19. It would shield the most vulnerable, like the elderly, and let younger people go back to school, college and work. In reality, it is a quasi-scientific tidbit from those people who, on the one hand, can’t stomach the uncomfortable ways to tamp down the virus (masks and social distancing), and, on the other hand, can’t admit that they failed to tamp down this virus.

According to herd immunity, if most of us are exposed to “it,” we will all develop an immunity. Herd immunity happens with a population when most of the people have developed immunity, generally via a vaccine, and the unprotected ones are protected by virtue of everybody else. If 99 people in a group are immune from x, the one person not vaccinated is protected too. We used to rely on herd immunity for measles, until small groups refused vaccination. (The result: children got measles.)

This won’t happen with COVID. The more people who test positive, the more this virus will spread. Eventually, it will spread to people, who will suffer, including people who can’t afford helicopter trips to Walter Reed and 24-hour medical attention at home. We have lost 220,000 people to COVID-19, and thousands more are suffering. Yet, understandably, a lot of Americans — those not sick — want to “open up” the economy. Herd immunity offers a quasi-scientific rationale.

The consequences of cavalierly “opening up” are dire. One prediction is that if we rely on herd immunity to master the disease, upwards of 500,000 more people will die.

A companion idea is that we can separate “low risk” from “high risk” people; and we can offer the latter “focused protection.” Intriguing, until you recognize that an enormous swathe of us — over age 70, with diabetes, asthma, any pre-existing condition — belongs in the group of “vulnerables.” Plus the non-vulnerables have grandparents and parents. To complicate the “focused protection” scheme, the “vulnerables” among us are doing the low-wage jobs that prop up the economy we want to open. Whom do we isolate?

If the Barrington Declaration is dangerous, its marriage to eugenics is frightening. Remember eugenics? Until Hitler took it to the extreme, the idea that we could/might/should weed out the weakest had traction. The past century of ethnic cleansings around the globe have made most of us quiver. This President revived the notion of “good genes.” Some people have them; others, less fortunate, have genes not so stellar. Admittedly, physicians recognize the role of genetics in specific diseases; e.g., Huntington’s, cancer, Alzheimer’s. Even for longevity, sometimes the key is not so much great diet, incessant exercise, or a stress-free life, but genes. President Trump, though, told white fans flocking to a Midwestern rally not to worry about COVID because they have “good genes.” Indeed, he lauded his and his family’s genes for their speedy recovery. Implicitly, he suggested that the poorer, blacker, and browner Americans, who have suffered disproportionately from COVID, have sub-standard genes.

It is true: poorer, blacker, and browner Americans have suffered disproportionately; but the reasons surely trace back to crowded apartments, unhealthy jobs, poor medical care. They haven’t had the luxury to “tele-commute.” Many don’t have jobs, much less computers.

To construct a semi-scientific test of “genes,” we might put people who supposedly enjoy “good genes” into jobs in meat-packing plants, factories, nursing homes, supermarkets.

That experiment might put to rest the enthusiasm for genetic invulnerability. In fact, young people do get the virus, as do upper-income people, as do accomplished professionals. The obituaries give the details.

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2020

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