Thread by @mlipsitch

This is just crazy. Mainstream experts have been trying to get through with almost no success. But take an out-there position and you get access. Of course take extra precautions for the most vulnerable. But don't relax everything else before evidence these precautions work.

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1313262724370051073

The argument is incoherent if you don't do low-cost low-inconvenience things like universal masking. Surely any rational strategy uses low-downside strategies to reduce transmission in the whole population while shielding the vulnerable.

Two of these scientists, @SunetraGupta and @MartinKulldorff, have long been my friends. But I think they are dead wrong without a demonstrated plan for how such shielding would work. There is no good example in a dense western country.

Most of us in the #IDepi world support a belt and suspenders approach - suppress transmission and try to shield the vulnerable. At present the "shield the vulnerable" alone strategy is taking scissors to the suspenders before there is any evidence of a viable belt.

Worse than that, this administration has systematically dodged its responsibility to provide a belt or suspenders or any other approach -- falling down on border control, testing, PPE, ICU capacity, and more, and encouraging irresponsible behavior.

Even if a shield-the-vulnerable strategy could work in principle, advocates of it should be pushing first for better testing, PPE, sick leave for staff, mental health protections, and others for nursing homes, and THEN for letting it rip, not the other way around.

Yes there have been proposals for how to protect the vulnerable as some have noted. But proposals and mathematical models of how they might work are not solutions; they are hypotheses (I say that as someone who creates these sometimes). No evidence that they work at scale.

And as @akcayerol put it in more colorful language, this is not an abstract discussion. It is a political discussion that has been made such by the White House. It is the height of hypocrisy to say "protect the vulnerable" and fail to use basic protections for high-risk @POTUS