Thread by @JWMason1

This Jacobin interview making the case for a herd-immunity approach to the coronavirus is really distressingly bad. jacobinmag.com/2020/09/covid-…

Weird for a socialist magazine to ignore the existence of people who *work* at schools, who are not themselves children. Even weirder that interviewer doesn't challenge them on this.

More broadly, greater transmission in one setting means more people infected across the board.

It's nonsense to say that we must reach herd immunity one way or another. Vietnam, New Zealand, etc. will not reach herd immunity because *there are no cases there*. Lots of diseases have been controlled not through immunity, but by limiting transmission.

"We" could presumably do what those counties have done. We could also presumably reduce transmission rate below 1 by universal mask use, limiting certain high-risk activities like indoor dining and bars, etc, at which point it would die out before herd immunity reached.

The claim that herd immunity must be reached is simply assuming the conclusion, that the changes to business as usual that controlling the coronavirus would require aren't worth it, and it's better to let some 100s of thousands or millions of older people die.

Never mentioned are the income-support measures that, in the US and elsewhere, have been remarkably successful at maintaining incomes and limiting economic hardship. It's no accident that demands for reopening have come overwhelmingly from business owners and the affluent.

Now that can change - in the US, expiration of pandemic uninsurance is going to lead to mass immiseration. But responsibility for that lies with pro-reopening people like the Jacobin interviewees, who are really demanding an economic stick to force workers back to their jobs.

What's maybe most striking is lack of any mention of the struggle sby teachers unions right now over reopening schools. Obviously Jacobin doesn't have to have a strict line in support of labor, but the fact that @NicoleAschoff didn't even find it worth asking about is surprising.

I should say for the reocrd that Jacobin prints a lot of stuff, some of it bad, much of it quite good. I think it's a mistake to infer from this any kind of coherent line. I don't think they should have run this interview, but it won't stop me from writing for them in the future.

To follow up on that bad Jacobin interview -- there are three dsitinct issues here, one technical/scientific, one political, and one that's a bit of both.

The technical question is whether the long-run outcome of the coronavirus will be herd immunity. The Jacobin interviewes say that's inevitable, like the law of gravity. I'm obviously not an epidemiologist or disease expert of any kind, but I think that can't be right.

If we look at the universe of diseases, we see various outcomes. 1) Herd immunity, whether natural (like chicken pox in the old days) or vaccine-based (chicken pox now). 2) Reduced transmission (cholera, malaria, etc.) 3) Getting cases down to zero. 4) Uncontrolled, endemic.

In the case of covid, it's clear that some countries have successfully reduced cases to close to zero and have measures in palce to deal with ones introduced from outside -- Vietnam, New Zealand, Mongolia, etc. This is possible! They never will reach herd immunity.

Obviously the ero-cases strategy requires a period of total lockdown. But another option is targeted policies that reudce the reproduction rate R below 1 - univesal mask use, closing of high-transmission activities like indoor dining and bars, etc.

Given the experience of NYC and elsewhee where cases have have been kept low for extended periods, it seems quite possible that a set of targeted measures can prevent widespread infection while allowing most activity to proceed as normal.

This approach doesn't promise that things will ever go back to the pre-covid normal, which I suppose is why people resist it. What if we can't go to bars indefinitely, but a million of our parents stay alive? I think that's ok (and I've spent a lot of time in bars.) Some don't.

As for herd immunity - well, maybe. We don't yet know if immunity lasts. But even if it does, that only works for the herd. In the context of herd immunity, isolating old people, as the Jacobin interviewees suggest, would have to be pemanent.

And of course a herd immunity approach in one country conflicts with a zero-cases approach anywhere else. Either there's never gong to be travel between the US and Vietnam, New Zealand, etc., or we tell them, hey we killed our grandparents, you have to kill yours too.

Or of course, there may be no herd immunity, just a new endemic disease, like flu but deadlier. Imagine the seasonal flu, except it kills 2 or 5 or 10 times as many people every year. Maybe the Jacobin interviewees have proof that that's impossible. If so they didn't share it.

That's the scientific qustion. Like I say, I certainly don't know the answers, but I know enough to know the absolute certainty of the Jacobin inerviewees is unjustified.

The political issue is that, right now, there are labor actions going on across the country among teachers over whether it's safe to return to their classrooms. I don't expect Jacobin to automatically support unions in these conflicts. I do expect them to acknoweldge they exist.

And more broadly, I think anyone on the left should recognize that politics is not just abstract debate and that there is an obligation, in your intellectual work, to be in solidarity with concrete struggle by working people - in this case, teachers.

To talk in the abstract about what teachers should do without discussing what teachers collectively say they can do - that's not ok. Teaching has been a front line in battles over whether workers should exercise power over their work and that's a critical context for this debate.

I think part of what it means to identify as a socialist or as on the left is to have an accountability to a social movement. If you're writing about schools, you need to at least ask yourself, what will this piece do if it's read at a meeting of the Chicago Teachers Union?

The third issue, which is both technical and political, is the real costs of lockdowns and more broadly of restrictions on economic activity in respons to the pandemic.

The claim is that lockdowns have disproportionately affected working-class people. I don't think this is true.

In the US, at least - but I think it's also true elsewhere - the pandemic stimulus masures fully maintained aggregate income. And according to the census, there has been no increase in the number of households that can't pay for food or rent.

The protests for reopening in the US have almost all been small business owners demanding their employees come back to work, and affluentv consumers who want their personal services back.

The most disturbig thing about the past eight months, for elite opinion, I think, is that it's been possible to meet everyone's basic needs and sustain aggregate income while a large fraction of people haven't been going in to work.

That's what's frightening to our masters. And that's what the Jacobin interviewees are against - they want the peasants back out in the fields.

This is the key political/technical point that that the inteview fails to engage with, imo - what if the bulk of paid work that people engage in today is strictly unessential, unneeded? What if much of restaurant, retail etc. producion is just performance of deference?

They say, the lockdown hits working people hardest. Maybe so -- but work also hits working people hardest. Mabe getting everything back to the way it was before is not the goal socialists should be striving for.