WHENEVER YOU HEAR SOMEONE SAY "HERD IMMUNITY" within public policy or even as a mere casual expectation that will come from public policy, they are talking about the presumed consequence of eugenics, presuming that if enough people get a disease, the weakest will die of it and the survivors will have a significant or complete immunity to the disease or at least enough immunity to mitigate the severity of it. The anti-vaccination, anti-masking Trumpian, Republican-fascist response to Covid-19 is, from start to finish, an unacknowledged citation of the same aspect of Darwinism that Nazism is based in, as, indeed, the thing that influenced it so much, the American, Canadian and other active eugenics programs that pre-date Nazism as a thing.
I have explained that before and at length. You can find the kernel of it in English in Darwin's The Descent of Man in one of his more infamous claims:
Look at this famous and famously infamous passage from The Descent of Man
There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
That is "herd immunity" from start to finish, "herd immunity" is not only a thoroughly Darwinist concept, the entire thing including comparing human beings and human society to animals kept in a commercial breeding operation, where they would be disposed of as economically desired and with an eye to improving the economic "fitness" of the animals in a herd (which is in no way comparable to their survivability and reproductive success in the wild) his complaint that one of the most successful public health measures in history, smallpox vaccination, had a dysgenic effect on the human species is essentially the one the Great Barrington Declaration signers attribute to containing the disease (Covid-19).
In my response to a comment on that piece I said:
One of the earliest names to surface in the "herd immunity" nonsense that Trump and his gangsters were said to be relying on was Richard Epstein who explicitly said he was practicing Darwinian economics,"I’m taking standard Darwinian economics—standard economic-evolutionary theory out of Darwin—and applying it to this particular case." I haven't found if the quack Dr. Atlas has identified his contentions with Darwin but I'd be surprised if he has any other source for it than the theory of natural selection in one of the more naive understandings of genetics, probably of an adaptationist bent. Perhaps one that no real geneticist or evolutionary biologist or epidemiologist would recognize as valid.
All through the literature of Darwinism, from Darwin and Haeckel and Huxley through Galton and Pearson, etc. right down to this week and this day they are all really enthusiastic about people dying so the human species can get better and better. One of the hilarious things I've read recently made the old claim that Darwinism doesn't believe evolution is progressive when Darwin never much stopped asserting it was when it came to the human species and that civilization, decency, a decent living to the poor, to Black People, Fuegians, Tasmanians, etc. was a clear and present danger to the human species. It's really an inversion of Mosaic and Christian morality, it's not in any way compatible with The Law or the Gospel. And they realized that almost as soon as they said it, I wouldn't be surprised if one of the reasons they invented natural selection was to have that effect. It's no wonder that Trump unwittingly adopts it, it's a boon to rich boys invented by a rich boy.
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"Herd immunity" is a belief which is extremely naive as can be seen in any number of very difficult to prevent viral illnesses, coming up with even effective immunization that can keep up with a rapidly mutating virus so as to mitigate its worst aspects is something even the most excellent of modern virology, epidemiology, etc. intervening at its most effective can barely keep up with. Even the most effective vaccines they have NOW and which should be taken now could possibly be overtaken by a virus run wild in the population. Without that intervention and preventative measures, you're only helping the virus to overcome any attempt to keep it contained and depriving it of opportunities to mutate more and more deadly strains. When Darwin came up with his cruel, immoral and Victorian aristocratic claims in science, he had nothing much to go on, he didn't know viruses existed and science certainly had no very good idea of what they were talking about. Today we retain the assumption that gave him his reasons for opposing universal vaccination while science certainly knows better. And this is only one of the things I talked about regarding the consequences of discontinued science retaining its power even after it had been discredited.
There is one thing that I think even one of the most important people around these days, the great Dr. Fauci doesn't understand as he tries to explain things to people in the government, in the media and the public is the extent of the public's naivete about what he's saying. A lot of the things he says that are conditioned and come with an expectation of the limits of science being understood are heard as absolute assurances of far greater knowledge on behalf of the scientists and doctors in his field and the permanence of even their best performances. That romantic, unrealistically heroic view of science, as promoted in numerous movies, TV shows, pulp-grade novels is something that even the truly heroic scientists and nurses, doctors, EMTs, etc cannot guarantee. Why should they be expected to when no one else does, either?
The down sides of Darwinism are many and started being manifested almost immediately after he published his version of natural selection, while not all of the worst response to this pandemic can counted against him, some of the worst of it can be.
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