As reported by The Washington Post, our Supreme Leader is being advised to surrender to the virus entirely and try to achieve “herd immunity.” This would be against the nearly-unanimous consensus of public health officials, and requires widespread rebuttal that can be made to make sure Trump is never, ever able to enact this literally fatal policy.

First, let’s be clear what the policy would be: Basically it boils down to, “Let’s keep people intentionally in the dark about who is and isn’t sick to get as many people sick as possible, until we achieve herd immunity.” Here are just five of the innumerable serious problems with that:

1) There is no evidence yet that there even *is* permanent immunity to COVID-19. The first confirmed re-infection case was just reported in the US, in addition to another in China a couple weeks ago. So *millions* could die, and tens of millions be left with permanent damage, if this joke of a “strategy” is implemented.

2) Let’s be more specific with those numbers. Even if herd immunity is possible, it would require an estimated 70% of people to become infected. In America alone, that is *200 million sick people,* compared to the 6 million sick so far. The death rate is estimated to be about 2.1% (or as much as twice that), so at minimum that is over 4 million dead Americans. If any of you have lost loved ones as I have, or seen them irreparably wounded, you can expect 33 times as many of those lives stolen or destroyed.

3) The death rate in America is particularly high. Why? Because we are, by far and by almost every measure, the sickest country in the world. 1 in 2 American adults have an invisible disability; 1 in 4 adults have two or more such ailments. These “preexisting conditions” make Americans far more vulnerable to death and/or serious and potentially permanent complications from COVID-19.

4) What do I mean by “permanent complications”? It’s important to discuss this, because this disease’s heavy toll goes beyond a dramatic death count. Take it from me: you don’t have to lose your life in order to lose your quality of life. Just from my immediate circle, I have a friend whose kidneys were damaged severely by the virus’ notorious blood clots and who still can’t sit up for more than a couple hours, another whose legs are now covered in tiny red spots, and another whose sweet 6-year-old daughter has literally changed personalities and now spends most of her time screaming and crying due to inflammation in her brain. So in addition to the 4 million deaths, you can expect tens of millions of lives not necessarily ended, but quite powerfully ruined.

5) THIS. ISN’T. NECESSARY. There are so many incredibly promising vaccines just on the horizon, utilizing all sorts of different approaches. One of them at the very least is bound to be effective, and probably many of them, and relatively soon. The reason Trump is considering putting hundreds of millions of lives at risk is simple: those vaccines won’t be available until the end of the year or early next year, which means he won’t benefit from it in this election. He wants to be able to say he has a plan… even if that plan means death and sickness at numbers that do not have a precedent in American history. Each and every one of those millions of lives, I remind you, is an individual person, with hopes, dreams, and – no matter how shaken by this destructive and uniquely uncaring regime – the most fundamental trust for which government was created in the first place: to protect our lives. Donald Trump has betrayed that trust time and time again, whether it’s an unarmed black citizen being shot by police, covert ops missions that he authorizes over dinner without being briefed on actual details that (surprise!) manage to go very wrong, or now with the coronavirus, the seriousness of which he has belittled and dismissed since day one, and continues to do so now.

Donald Trump is asking our entire country to enter a dark room filled with sharp objects and alligator pits, all so that he can say he “has a plan.”

Well, we must have a plan too. We must vote for Joe Biden in such monumental numbers that Trump and his entire entourage of sadists and sociopaths are sent back into the swamps they came from. And if we do, maybe then – God willing – we will actually have a plan out of this that doesn’t require millions of us to suffer and die for the sake of one man’s unearned and insatiable ego.

Just because a relatively low number of people have COVID-19 today does not impact your odds of getting it in the future. To think otherwise is to use the exact same logic Trump used weeks ago when only 10 people had it in the whole country; now 200,000 people have it (a figure which is estimated to be as much as 80% lower than the actual number due to lack of testing and the extraordinary range of symptomatic responses). Project that exponential growth forward and your odds of getting it are actually quite high.