Wednesday
The Trump administration has descended into ever deeper levels of tragic farce by elevating Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist (specialty: MRI machines) to primary health consultant for dealing with Covid-19. Doctors and medical expert around the nation gape in horror as Atlas recommends a herd immunity approach that could well lead to another million Americans dying and may not work anyway.
I, meanwhile, find myself fixated on the guy’s name, which conjures up the name of Charles Atlas from my childhood. In ads that I remember on the backs of comic books, the Italian weightlifter promised readers that bullies would no longer kick sand into their faces if they bought his shoddy weight-lifting equipment.
The name also conjures up Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. In today’s post, I link them all—quack medical solutions, cheap “get strong quick” products, and libertarian Übermensch fantasies.
First, let’s dispense with Scott Atlas’s claims. Tom Frieden, a physician and former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, points out what is wrong with them:
Less than 15 percent of Americans have been infected by the virus that causes covid-19. If immunity among those who have been infected and survived is strong and long-lasting (and it may well be neither), and if herd immunity kicks in at 60 percent infection of the population (and it might be higher), with a fatality rate of 0.5 percent among those infected, then at least another half-million Americans — in addition to the 220,000 who have already died — would have to die for the country to achieve herd immunity. And that’s the best-case scenario. The number of deaths to get there could be twice as high.
The route to herd immunity would run through graveyards filled with Americans who did not have to die, because what starts in young adults doesn’t stay in young adults. “Protecting the vulnerable,” however appealing it may sound, isn’t plausible if the virus is allowed to freely spread among younger people. We’ve seen this in families, communities and entire regions of the country. First come cases in young adults. Then the virus spreads to older adults and medically vulnerable people. Hospitalizations increase. And then deaths increase.
Herd immunity is normally achieved through vaccinations. When enough people are vaccinated against a disease, then those who can’t be vaccinated (say, very young children) are protected because everyone around them is protected. But to simply allow everyone to randomly get Covid means that everyone they come into contact with is a potential victim, either of death or permanent impairment.
The effect might be that only the strong will survive, a fantasy in line with both Charles Atlas and Atlas Shrugged. In Jack Driscoll’s 1987 elegy to Charles Atlas, we see the painful sense of vulnerability that the weightlifter’s comic book ads spoke to:
Elegy: Charles Atlas (1893-1972)
When you died
I remembered myself at fifteen, posing
half naked in the bathroom mirror,
that skinny kid whose body reeked of loneliness.
I never ordered the barbells, the nutrition tips,
never sent you that snapshot my father took of me
beside the public swimming pool, arms crossed and shivering.
But some nights I’d open a comic book
to the back page, try to imagine
how you hauled that train
a hundred yards down those shiny rails,
and how a draft horse strapped later
into the same harness strained and strained,
collapsing finally to its knees to die.Your heart exploded at seventy-nine.
Weakened by the news
I fell asleep on my son’s weightbench
in our basement. He does not know your name,
though in a dream that afternoon
I saw someone who looks like him
screaming for help, unable
to lift that terrible pain from your chest.So much for your faith in the flesh,
the decades of bulking-up
after that Coney Island lifeguard kicked sand
in your face. Atlas,
I do not believe any god ever hoisted the world
the way you did the back end of a Chevrolet in 1941.
That was enough,
nearly the impossible as we saw it,
that bunch who one day grabbed a bumper together,
each of us flexing, expand our chests
as if we might call you,
the only witness to our grunts and moans,
the enormity of our growing up.
Driscoll is referring to the mythic Atlas when he notes, “I do not believe any god ever hoisted the world the way you did the back end of a Chevrolet in 1941.” In Ayn Rand’s fantasy, Übermensch capitalist John Galt has so much power and self confidence that he can simply shrug the world from his shoulders. All the lesser people—those who attempt to protect themselves with burdensome regulations and taxes—will perish, at which point the truly strong will emerge from the ruins and remake the world in their own image.
Putting the drama in terms of Covid, the weak and old will be culled from the population, leaving the world to superman Trump and his followers, who imagine themselves endowed with his superpowers when they follow him. Apparently following Trump’s own recovery from the illness (thanks in part to top-flight medical care and a quarter of a million dollars in medical treatment), Trump fantasized ripping off his shirt and revealing a superman logo. In his dreams, he’s the one kicking sand in the face of weaklings.
One of Trump’s more ironic slips occurred several weeks ago when, instead of saying “herd immunity,” he said “herd mentality.” The herd mentality of his cult followers is indeed one of Trump’s sources of power, and that they are all too ready to pass death sentences on potential Covid sufferers (along with children of asylum seekers, black victims of police brutality, and Michigan’s governor) gives us insight into their blind loyalty: he convinces them that they can be as strong as he supposedly is.
As a caution to them, I offer up Ralph Hodgson’s poem “The Bull,” which is about a bull who drew energy from the herd until he didn’t. Once his life looked like this:
Dreaming, this old bull forlorn,
Surely dreaming of the hour
When he came to sultan power,
And they owned him master-horn,
Chiefest bull of all among
Bulls and cows a thousand strong.
And in all the tramping herd
Not a bull that barred his way,
Not a cow that said him nay…
Now, however, he is “sick in soul and body both” and has been “banished from the herd he led.” A prime candidate for an ICU bed as vultures circle overhead, he can only reminisce about the good old days:
And the dreamer turns away
From his visionary herds
And his splendid yesterday,
Turns to meet the loathly birds
Flocking round him from the skies,
Waiting for the flesh that dies.
Does Scott Atlas consider a million extra deaths a necessary price to pay for his promotion? Does he think it’s no big deal if he shrugs the world from his shoulders? Does he imagine that he has a strength comparable to Charles Atlas because they share a name?
And how will he and his boss feel when the loathly birds begin to flock around them?