Donald Trump doubled down on his claim that the coronavirus will just disappear on its own one day without a vaccine because the United States will develop “herd mentality.”
During a town hall on Tuesday hosted by ABC News, Trump said:
“With time it goes away. You’ll develop, you’ll develop herd — like a herd mentality. It’s going to be, it’s going to be herd-developed, and that’s going to happen. That will all happen. But with a vaccine, I think it will go away very quickly.”
Trump may be confusing ‘herd immunity’ with ‘herd mentality’. But herd immunity is much worse. To achieve herd immunity, the coronavirus would be allowed to spread quickly within the country without any resistance. To stop its spread, a significant percentage of the population about 80% would have to develop an immunity to the virus.
To get to that point, millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions and a compromised immune system will die.
Also, there’s still a lot that scientists don’t know about the coronavirus. We still don’t know for sure if an individual can be reinfected with the coronavirus, a study came out just last month saying reinfection is possible in some people.
So, yeah we joke about Trump’s herd mentality gaffe but let’s not get too caught up in that. Remember he had to be talked down from letting the virus just run through the population. Tonight’s events show that he’s still thinking about it.
