Americans shouldn’t have to pay the price because their leadership follows the poor advice of ivory tower academics.

Americans deserve the best advice possible.

Because Americans live in an imperfect world, they must necessarily receive advice from physicians who also live in that imperfect world.

The academics do not live in an imperfect world; they live in the cloistered ivory tower which shields itself from the imperfections of the real world.

With that stated, let us deconstruct the perceived wonderfulness of the academic.

To begin with, our noble academics did not come to earth from Krypton.

Our academics grew up here on earth and trained at the same medical schools as working physicians in private practice.

Their names are not Kal-el and Jor-el.

In many cases, our noble academics got their asses kicked academically by those physicians who chose to enter private practice.

The noble academic is in no selective possession of reasoning power or critical thinking.

The leader in government and otherwise uninformed novice may think so because the noble academic resides within the walled-off tomb of the Mecca, a complex of steel and glass edifices that reach to the heavens.

The Mecca is a glorious place.

Why God must reside there.

And the physicians who work there must be superior.

Alas, it is not so.

On the contrary, the academic’s thinking is hampered by three principal factors.

First is an arrogance that comes from universal love. The academic is regularly catered to by students and governmental leaders.

This arrogance begets careless thinking.

Second, those academics chose to seclude themselves from the real world. More than many did so in part or in full because they did not like or approve of the world’s messiness.

It is a real truth that some people cannot handle messiness; they need complete order in their lives.

It is fair to say that this is a trait of many academics.

These academics love the purity of numbers, the purity of statistics, the purity of algorithms, the purity of rules.

This is reflected in their research and approach to education.

Generally academics place a premium upon these ideal rules and algorithms and come to value these truths over the world’s messiness.

These academics err when they construct a rule or algorithm and then falsely believe that the rule or algorithm is truth.

They err further when they conduct policy based upon that rule or algorithm.

Third, the academic in our modern world is a government employee. Attendant with being a government employee is a sense of obedience to the hand that feeds you.

This compromises the academic. How many academics will risk going against government orthodoxy when it might jeopardize their career?

Not too many.

If you see many academics obeying the government line with regard to COVID-19, this should not surprise you.

If you see many academics singing the songs of the lockdown and the face mask, this should not surprise you.

The norm in academia is to go along.

To get along you go along.

That’s not the way academia should be; academia is supposed to be an environment where differing ideas can be exchanged freely without recrimination.

This is far from the truth.

One of the truths in academia these days is their definition of herd immunity.

It is orthodoxy actually.

Rabid orthodoxy.

Herd immunity has been defined by the academic as an endpoint in an epidemic, that point at which no infection can be transmitted by virtue of the citizens being immune.

This is a poor definition. It is an ideal definition. It is just the sort of definition that academics love.

This definition is not workable in the real world.

In the real world, right now on 11/12/2020, we are not seeking perfection in defeating the coronavirus. We will take any savings in lives that we can get.

This is what distinguishes the working physician who enters private practice from the physician who resides in academia.

Your physician who works in private practice understands that you have to take a half a loaf of bread in achieving victory.

Your noble academic does not understand that. For him there is total victory or nothing.

This is a non-workable solution to solving the COVID-19 catastrophe.

The rule or definition that the academics have set up for herd immunity is too pure, and too wrong.

A better definition is to define herd immunity as a gradual process that begins when the very first person recovers from COVID-19 and therefore becomes immune.

This would occur early on in the disease, about a week to ten days after the COVID-19 hits our shores.

Embracing this approach gives you hope and gives you a model for saving lives.

Embracing this approach leads the private physician and the leader, who has the courage to follow him, to say, OK, why don’t we try to increase the amount of herd immunity by 10% or 20% to see if we can save lives. How can we accomplish this?

Currently, your noble academic has led your leaders astray into a pit of despair. These purists are saying to the leaders and citizens at-large that herd immunity is impossible and that our only hope is a vaccine.

The working physician is asking why we don’t employ our immune systems to fight the disease while we are developing a vaccine.

The academic’s definition of herd immunity leads you to sequester inside your house until a vaccine is developed.

The working physician’s definition leads you to mingle and congregate as fast as you possibly can while a vaccine is being developed.

The distinction could not possess starker contrast.

Let’s be frank now. The academics and their sycophants have had their say. We have tried their approach. We have sequestered ourselves in our houses, and it has not worked.

It has not worked because their definition is in error.

It’s time to try a new approach.

Americans should not have to pay with their lives because of the noble thinking from academia.

Sincerely,

Archer Crosley

Copyright 2020 Archer Crosley All Rights Reserved