'We want kids INFECTED. Open up and flood the zone.' How Trump advisor told HHS officials to go for 'herd immunity' and demanded Fauci was gaffed - while Ivanka interfered in school safety advice, unsealed government docs reveal
- Science advisor at HHS Paul Alexander promoted 'herd immunity' in emails
- He was recruited by Michael Caputo, a former assistant secretary at HHS
- 'We want them infected,' he wrote
- Wanted to let kids get infected to 'flood the zone' and get natural immunity
- Administration was touting masks and distancing at the time - but the president was not doing either himself
- Caputo had worked for the Trump 2016 campaign
- Alexander was not a medical doctor but wanted Dr. Tony Fauci silence because 'he is not credible' and he is 'confusing people'
- SCROLL DOWN TO READ THE EMAILS
A Trump political appointee made his pitch for 'herd immunity' to combat the coronavirus through mass infection in crude terms that are now being revealed in unsealed government documents.
Paul Alexander was brought in as the 'science adviser' to a senior Health and Human Services official in spring and used his position to demand young people were infected en masse, or alternatively locked up in colleges - and that Dr. Tony Fauci was silenced.
The Canadian researcher - an academic with a science, rather than medical degree - was apparently recruited for his views and used his perch to push for the controversial idea that infecting massive numbers of people would eventually lead to broad immunity.
The White House repeatedly denied it was pursuing 'herd immunity,' despite also elevating Dr. Scott Atlas to the Coronavirus Task Force after he used a series of Fox News appearances to push the idea. Atlas quit after the election.
Alexander articulated his plan – which involved millions of Americans getting the virus so that it would eventually run out of hosts and die off – in emails to another Trump appointee, Michael Caputo, a former assistant secretary at HHS.
'Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk….so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected,' he wrote, in stunning emails the House Oversight Committee's coronavirus select subcommittee obtained and provided to Politico.
Defending the herd position, Alexander wrote in the July 4 memo to Caputo and others: 'There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD.'
A July email to Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn along with other officials and Caputo described the theory.
'[I]t may be that it will be best if we open up and flood the zone and let the kids and young folk get infected.' This would allow them to get 'natural immunity…natural exposure,' Alexander wrote.
On July 3 he wrote of his campaign for herd immunity that if young people were infected more 'who cares?'
'So the bottom line is if it is more infectiouness [sic] now, the issue is who cares? If it is causing more cases in young, my word is who cares…as long as we make sensible decisions, and protect the elderely [sic] and nursing homes, we must go on with life….who cares if we test more and get more positive tests…' he wrote.
And he peddled claims which were then echoed by the president, including a claim that there would be more deaths from 'despair' than from COVID. SO far more than 300,000 people have died from COVID and excess death statistics strongly suggest that deaths from 'despair' are far lower, experts say.
'The focus has to be on reopening the economy as the deaths and despair and loss due to that will outstrip by far anything COVID can visit,' he wrote on June 15.
'The vast majority will be fine. Responsibility has to shift from the state to the individual.'
Alexander also attacked Fauci in the emails, suggesting that he knew more than the veteran leader of the CDC's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
'Stop Fauci from talking...he is confusing people... he flip flops the message too much... and the result is now he is not credible...' he wrote.
'I talk to lots of people and read the IT world. Others are... he is not.'
That was hardly his only attack on Fauci.
On July 3 he raged against Fauci appearing on TV to warn about a mutation on COVID which had been identified.
'Now Fauci is embarking on the news to scare the world again...we must lock down for 10 years...if he had his way,' he wrote.
'He just wont stop!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! He cant keep quiet...and he is just not on the same page of the govn... does he think he is the President?'
Alexander also sent an email at 1.57am on July 27 to Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, saying that college students should have been locked on campuses until Christmas instead of being sent home in March and April.
In a breathless message written with minimal punctuation, he suggested that it was a 'mistake' to have sent students home.
Instead they should have been forced to stay on campuses, other students who commuted loaded into them too, and kept there until long after Christmas.
The students who moved around the country when colleges largely closed or went virtual at Easter were, he claimed, the origin of the spike in the disease at the time.
'Good night Dr. Redfield, I think it is the university student/college student in North America that seeded lots of the virus across the nations...why?' he wrote.
'Because just before easter break middle to late March (??), we locked schools down and after easter, we told parents that kids cant come back to school..we will debate that for years and I say it was wrong for soon after we figured out it were 75- 80 year olds with underlying medical conditions who were the prime targets of COVID virus.
'Folk who would have died absent of COVID...people who are very ill ordinarily...
'To me, now as I reflect, it may be the university students, a few million of them across the nation, that we had to lock down, even quarantine, and simultaneously locked down the elderly.'
The students, he wrote,'took this virus home to mommy/daddy who then infected granny.'
'In a twisted way we need them all to go back to university, fast, and stay there come Nov/Dec...do not come home for this xmas 2020.'
And in July he floated a theory that New York City had achieved herd immunity, based on a study at the time which had suggested up to 25% of people in the city had antibodies to coronavirus. The finding has since been disputed.
Alexander told Caputo that there was no way a city with 'public health in disarray' could have 'tamped down' the virus since its early place at the tip of the spearhead of deaths and infections in March, April and May.
Instead, he suggested, the city had reached herd immunity. So too, he theorized, had the USS Roosevelt, the aircraft carrier which became a floating superspreader with a sailor dying.
Apparently impressed by the idea Caputo - who had no scientific qualifications but did previously work in Russia - replied to him: 'How can this be research and proven true or false?'
Alexander praised Trump, attacked President Barack Obama for 'introducing Ebola' and said of the H1N1 outbreak in 2011: ' Where was Dr. Fauci and his doom and gloom?'
One of his emails was a long suggested series of talking points for Alex Azar, the HHS secretary, which included claiming - in June - that: 'The one thing that these prior pathogen outbreaks did not have was President Trump as President.'
And one talking point he proffered, one June 24, said: 'There is a rise in cases due to testing.'
Trump made that claim repeatedly for months, and has continued to do so even as deaths and hospitalizations soar.
He edited a press statement about cruise lines voluntarily agreeing not to sail to remove 'death' from the risks faced by their passengers.
The internal emails came even as the coronavirus task force was pleading with Americans to wear a mask and social distance to 'stop the spread.'
Alexander has previously been identified as sending in changes for the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which catalogs national deaths.
Caputo, who has longstanding Trump ties and was a political appointee, brought Alexander, a Canadian researcher, on as his deputy.
Alexander earned a PhD in health research methodologies at McMaster University in Canada in 2015 and was a part-time assistant professor there.
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