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President Trump has long seemed fascinated with the idea that herd immunity could provide an easy end to the coronavirus pandemic, even before his own diagnosis with covid-19 and his blithe declaration after he checked himself out of the hospital that no one should be afraid of getting it. “With time, it goes away,” he told an ABC News town hall last month. “And you’ll develop — you’ll develop herd — like a herd mentality. It’s going to be — it’s going to be herd-developed, and that’s going to happen. That will all happen.” The neuroradiologist he brought in to advise on the pandemic response over the summer, Scott Atlas, has argued that rising case counts will bring the nation to herd immunity faster. (Marc Lipsitch, Gregg Gonsalves, Carlos del Rio and Rochelle P. Walensky, 10/14)

... The arrival of a second wave and the realisation of the challenges ahead has led to renewed interest in a so-called herd immunity approach, which suggests allowing a large uncontrolled outbreak in the low-risk population while protecting the vulnerable. Proponents suggest this would lead to the development of infection-acquired population immunity in the low-risk population, which will eventually protect the vulnerable. This is a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence. (10/15)

As if Donald Trump's irresponsibility was not already a national tragedy, the White House seems now to favor a controversial approach to Covid-19 that threatens to bring nothing less than mass suffering.More than 216,000 Americans have already died. Yet on Tuesday, senior Trump administration officials said that they were receptive to pursuing "herd immunity," an approach touted by a group of scientists who have put out what they call the "Great Barrington Declaration." (Jeffrey Sachs, 10/14)

Politicians often flatter their audiences, but at a rally in Bemidji, Minn., last month, President Trump found an unusual thing to praise about the nearly all-white crowd: its genetics. “You have good genes,” he insisted. “A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. … You have good genes in Minnesota.” In case it was not clear from the sea of white faces that he was making a point about race, Trump later said the quiet part out loud. “Every family in Minnesota needs to know about Sleepy Joe Biden’s extreme plan to flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia, from other places all over the planet,” he declared. (Adam Cohen, 10/14)

President Trump’s executive order on essential medicines aims to encourage pharmaceutical companies to bring their manufacturing back to the U.S. But it may also have unintended consequences for both domestic and foreign companies. (Joy Strum, 10/15)

Governments’ responses to today’s pandemic are laying a foundation for tomorrow’s surveillance state... History has shown that powers acquired during an emergency often outlive the original threat. And governments in democracies as well as authoritarian states are now exploiting the health crisis to digitize, collect, and analyze our most intimate data, thus threatening permanent harm to our privacy. (Adrian Shahbaz and Allie Funk, 10/14)

Voters can’t weigh in on the Barrett nomination, but they can correct this country’s course. Here’s the fundamental question: Will voters reward the party that is working to provide more health care, or the party that has painstakingly robbed one million children of insurance? Will voters help tug the United States forward, or will they support the backward thinkers who have been on the side of discrimination, racism, bigotry and voter suppression? At the polls, which side of history will you stand on? (Nicholas Kristof, 10/14)

On the surface, American politics appears to be full of paradoxes. In 2016, many women — and especially white Christian women — voted for Donald Trump over the first woman nominated for U.S. president by a major party. Now, in 2020, confirmation hearings are occurring for a woman, nominated by Trump, who opposes a woman’s right to choose abortion. How might those women who voted for Trump feel about these hearings that reopen questions about women’s autonomy over their own bodies? (Landon Schnabel, 10/14)

A Biden administration would aim to address today’s critical challenges — Covid-19, gaps in health insurance coverage, high costs, and inadequate care for the disabled — by means of actionable reforms aimed at the most vulnerable Americans. (Sherry Glied, 10/15)

The travesty of the 2020 college football season is now on full display. With the SEC schedule collapsing like a house of cards, the biggest name in the sport, 68-year-old Alabama head coach Nick Saban, has tested positive for COVID-19 and is currently in isolation at home, the university announced Wednesday evening. Thankfully, Saban is not experiencing any symptoms of the coronavirus, he said in a statement. Alabama’s athletic director Greg Byrne, 48, also tested positive, the university said. For now, No. 2 Alabama’s game with No. 3 Georgia is still on for this weekend, but the same can’t be said for two other SEC contests that are no longer on the schedule. LSU’s game at Florida was postponed Wednesday when it was announced that 21 Florida players had tested positive, meaning the school would have fewer than 50 scholarship players available when adding in everyone who came into contact with the infected players and is now in quarantine. (Christine Brennan, 10/14)

n Monterey County, 26% of the county’s COVID-19 cases are in East Salinas, a largely Latino community of farmworkers, service employees and others living in crowded conditions as they work on the pandemic front lines. It’s a very different story in the county’s wealthy seaside communities, including Monterey, Carmel and Pacific Grove. Combined, these locales have a population that slightly exceeds that of East Salinas — but they have only about 2% of the county’s coronavirus cases. (Angele Glover Blackwell and Manuel Pastor, 10/14)

Dave was laid off from his hotel job in March due to the coronavirus pandemic, and he lost his health insurance too. A week later, he was rushed to the emergency room with a lung problem. With support from an enrollment assister, he was able to enroll in MassHealth coverage that was made possible because of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. He is just one of the hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts residents given a lifeline by the ACA. (Elizabeth Warren, Amy Rosenthal, and Kate Walsh, 10/14)