Dear AI,
I have a personal favor for you. I’m begging you. I really need you to come through here. It’s a big favor, I know, but I wouldn’t ask unless it was really important to me.
You see, I just want my life back.
I live here in Hidalgo County. The county judge is a real nice guy, but he’s under a lot of pressure; and I’m not getting through to him.
I’ve sent him a lot of letters, but I’m not really high on the rung politically. I know, it’s my fault. I don’t really get out there socially and hobnob with people.
It’s not that I don’t like people; it’s just that I’m so freaking exhausted at the end of the day. There’s a lot of pressure in taking care of children. I know that we’re not taking care of acute disasters like emergency room doctors and surgeons, But there’s a lot of potential pressure. The mistakes we pediatricians make are errors of omission rather than errors of commission.
If we make a mistake, it affects someone for the next sixty years of their life. As pediatricians we have to think of prevention and consequences.
Which is the approach I take to the coronavirus. I’m more focused on what we can do to prevent loss of life.
Which is why am I opposed to the lockdown. I firmly believe that the pursuit of herd immunity is the course of action we should have taken. Currently we have 150,000 deaths in the United States, and it looks like we are going to have many more.
My belief is that we could’ve been one and done with 75,000 deaths and full herd immunity.
The problem I have is that I am going up against the machine and the Ivy League who have indoctrinated our leaders here in Hidalgo County to believe that Dr. Fauci and our Ivy League leaders in DC are the best and the brightest.
Of course, having grown up in the Northeast I know that they’re not. Nevertheless this is the predicament I find myself in.
There’s no way that the leaders here are going to listen to me, so I need you to do me a big favor. And I’m sure that if you listen carefully you will hear other regular doctors, commoners, non-nobles, voicing the same concerns.
I need you to take the thoughts of we commoners who believe in herd immunity and implant them in the mind of a Harvard graduate. Then I need you to make that Harvard graduate believe that those thoughts are his or her own. I then need you to put that Harvard graduate in a position of prominence where he or she can be heard.
Then I need you to have that Harvard graduate convince our current leaders that we should pursue herd immunity.
Currently in Hidalgo County we are in the midst of a surge. This surge began on June 15. We are now seven weeks into the new virtual lockdown. It’s not an official lockdown, but it’s a lockdown nonetheless.
The rationale behind the lockdown is that we should’ve done what New York did. Currently Dr. Fauci is touting New York As the Garden of Coronavirus Eden for having locked everyone down.
If only we had done what New York had done, our leaders lament, we wouldn’t have these deaths. Well, we have been in lockdown for seven weeks, and not much has changed.
I have tried to convince our leaders that we are sitting ducks, that the virus isn’t going anywhere, that the virus is sitting outside our door waiting for us to come outside. I have tried to tell them that we should pursue herd immunity right now.
We need to stop looking at the glass 1% empty, I tell them, and start looking at the glass 99% full. It’s a good thing that people are getting infected. We want people to get infected. We don’t want to lock people up. The faster we get people infected, the closer we will get to herd immunity and the less people will die.
I wish I could come up with some graphic example to demonstrate this, but I am struggling. I need you, AI, to help me.
I’ve tried using the clasp knife example. I have tried to tell them that if you gently close a clasp knife it will move to a critical point and then snap shut.
I am using this as an analogy to show them what will happen to the death count as we approach a critical point in herd immunity The death count will suddenly collapse to zero.
I’m not getting anywhere, so I guess it must be because I’m not a Harvard graduate. As you may know, we have programmed society to believe that only Harvard graduates possess the truth.
That’s why I need you to put my thoughts, our thoughts, in the mind of a Harvard graduate. In that way, the leaders will listen and do what is right.
No one will have to know where the idea came from. None of we commoners care about Presidential awards or credit. That our patients return to see us, that they refer their friends to us, that they enable us to live productive lives, is the award we receive every day of the week.
We just want our lives back.
Sincerely,
Archer Crosley, MD
McAllen, TX
Friday, August 7, 2020
Copyright 2020 Archer Crosley All Rights Reserved
Cowboy Archer 