Herd

The UK press has done their best to memory hole it - THAT DID NOT HAPPEN SHUTUPSHUTSHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP - but it wasn't that long ago that the UK virus plan was to let everybody get it as quickly as possible. The product was being rolled out. The prime minister claiming to shake hands of coronavirus patients in hospitals. Journalists being told that their "herd immunity" plan was JUST SCIENCE, BRO and Proper British Science, unlike those dumb euro-weenies. Critics - including the opposition party - being given the LOL DUMMIE IT'S JUST SCIENCE WHY DO YOU HATE SCIENCE treatment by asskissing journalists.

Yep. I really need some hipster analysis to reassure me

— Ayesha Hazarika (@ayeshahazarika) March 13, 2020

Until suddenly they realized that letting a million of their core voters die was not necessarily the best plan.

This stance became increasingly hard to defend after it emerged that the government’s initial strategy — allowing the virus to infect the young and healthy in the hope of building “herd immunity” that would protect vulnerable groups — was, at least partly, based on faulty modeling. Specifically, scientists advising the government had used data for a different disease with a much lower hospitalization rate than had been observed in countries hit earlier by COVID-19.

Pro-government commentators quickly divided into two camps, with the first adopting a position that’s almost too absurd to engage with seriously. They claimed that nothing about the government’s approach had actually changed, the public had simply failed to understand it properly.

That footage you watched of the UK’s chief scientific adviser explaining why “herd immunity” through widespread infection was a desirable goal? Those words didn’t actually mean what you thought they did. The Newsnight segment where a Public Health England official told us to see our elderly relatives, go to the pub, and generally carry on as usual if we didn’t have symptoms, despite the evidence globally of asymptomatic transmission? It simply never happened. Who are you going to trust, your lying eyes or the 2017 winner of the Political Commentator of the Year award?

The Herd is YOU.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has tested positive for coronavirus.

Mr Johnson said he had developed mild symptoms over the past 24 hours, including a temperature and cough.