This paragraph from N_ is so true it deserves this repost:
– But he is throwing the accusation now that “Boris Johnson wanted herd immunity”. What he really means is that Boris Johnson wanted to achieve herd immunity before a vaccine was ready, by letting the virus kill off a large part of the population, and by letting another large part of the population die who needed life-saving treatment in hospital but who wouldn’t be getting it. But he feels he can’t say that, perhaps because he himself is known to have had the same position.
At that time, no one could possibly know whether widespread infection would result in herd immunity – the policy was based upon an entirely unfounded assumption about a virus that had never been seen before. But rapid increase, overloaded hospitals and mass death were facts, impossible to miss in the earliest and subsequent outbreaks, over preceding weeks and even months.
For a group of very powerful and well informed people to ignore multiple, consistent, glaring facts, and instead to seize in unison upon one imaginary hope and impose it upon everyone else… This is rank insanity, resembling superstitious, fundamentalist religious delusion. And it suggests a milder but more distributed madness in each of us, to whatever extent we accept the authority of the system that gives them power.