I know: it’s a big claim. “One of the most insane ideas in modern history?” He can’t be serious! You, my friend, can be the judge.

You’ve heard, by now, of America’s bizarre, dismal lack of a response to Coronavirus. But Britain’s lack of a response is even crazier. Yes, really. America’s not responding because it’s a broken society with no public goods: it can’t. But Britain’s not responding because it doesn’t think it should — a conclusion reached by one of the most surreal cocktails of arrogance, pseudoscience, and crackpot punditry the modern world has ever seen.

Imagine that the anti-vaxxers took over a whole society. Britain’s currently in the midst of something exactly, precisely like that, except for a global pandemic — Coronavirus.

Let me give you the facts. According to Robert Peston, one of the UK’s top journalists, Britain’s leaders’ brilliant idea is…”to allow the virus to pass through the entire population so that we acquire herd immunity.” Other journalists have noted the same thing.

Wait, what? “Herd immunity”? What’s that, you ask? Here’s your answer, dear reader.

“Herd immunity describes how a population is protected from a disease after vaccination by stopping the germ responsible for the infection being transmitted between people.” In other words, we vaccinate about half the population or more, and then everyone else is protected, too (especially like immunocompromised people, for whom vaccines can be genuinely dangerous.)

Did you see a small problem between the British government’s definition of herd immunity…and what it actually is? Herd immunity is — the real thing — what happens after enough members of a population have been vaccinated. It’s not…just letting an entire nation be rampaged by a lethal virus for which there’s no vaccine. How much death and mayhem would that cause, by the way? “57 million people infected and 1.1 million people dying.”

Good, sweet Lord. Let me summarize. Britain’s leaders appear to want the whole nation to get Coronavirus because they don’t understand basic science, logic, or history — they think that everyone getting sick magically confers resistance on a nation. That is not how disease works. Herd immunity is what happens after large-scale vaccination, as a viral infection subsides. It’s not…just letting a virus run rampant, with the bizarre, vague hope that naturally acquired immunity will somehow emerge and spread amongst the population. That is just a recipe for absolute catastrophe.

Words are beginning to fail me at this point, not just because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a government in a rich country base policy on such rank ignorance — but because I’ve never imagined, really, that a British government would let crackpot anti-vaxxer pseudoscience dictate it’s entire response to…an actual global pandemic. What on earth?

The human species never developed “herd immunity” to polio or smallpox or any virus, really — ever, despite millennia of death and illness and misery. Why not? Because herd immunity depends on vaccines. We vaccinate a large number of people, and then all of us are protected, because transmission rates are reduced (among other things.) Let me make the point again. The human race never developed herd immunity to a lethal virus, precisely because herd immunity is not something that emerges naturally. What happens, instead, when we let a virus simply take its course? What happened with smallpox and polio: they just rampage through populations, forever.

The British government’s Coronavirus strategy, in other words, is founded on the most surreal and astonishing kind of pseudoscience. Why is it pseudoscience? Let me try to dig into the point above. Why is that, for the majority of humanity history, nobody, and I mean nobody as a population, developed the slightest form of “herd immunity” to, say, polio or smallpox — both viral killers of the most terrible kind? Why is it that they went right on killing people, no matter how many people they had killed before…since no one, really was developing more immunity to them? Because

Herd immunity isn’t the spread of natural immunity amongst a population. Let’s think about that point. Herd immunity isn’t me developing “natural immunity”, and then passing it on to you. Why not? Because such a thing is impossible. How would I pass on my “natural immunity” to you? With magic? Spells? Incantations? You can’t use my antibodies. That’s what a vaccine is — a refined form of just such a thing. We don’t have one for Coronavirus yet precisely because the work of formulating such a vaccine in the lab hasn’t concluded yet.

Are you seeing my point? The idea that “herd immunity” will protect a nation from Coronavirus is three things. One, sheer, unbelievable levels of folly: a mistaken idea of what herd immunity is to begin with, the lack of knowledge that it depends on vaccination. Three, pseudoscience, which doesn’t seem to understand the basic idea that viruses do not magically subside if we just let them have their way, as we develop “natural immunity.” We don’t, which is why smallpox and polio kept on killing and disfiguring people for millennia. Three, magical thinking, based on the superstition that my natural immunity will magically protect you, which it won’t because I can’t transmit it to you, but I can transmit a virus.

I’m genuinely staggered, my friends. And you should be too. This idea that the correct response to Coronavirus is “herd immunity” — meaning letting a deadly virus rampage through an entire nation, causing mayhem on an unbelievable scale, is actually, really one of the most astonishingly foolish things I have ever seen. Ever. I cannot believe a government of any kind — let alone a British one — can be so stupid as to believe in such quackery.

Let me restate some of the above, in case it’s not clear.

Entire populations do not develop “herd” or “natural” immunity all by themselves to viruses — ever. If they did, polio and smallpox and a long, long list of other viruses, like AIDS, would not have killed people for literally most of human history. They would have burned themselves out, and then receded. They didn’t. They just kept on killing, until we developed vaccines. That simple history isn’t just disproof of the idea of the emergence of “natural immunity” as epidemics rage — it’s something literally every schoolchild should know

People who are naturally immune to viruses do not magically pass it on to everyone else. Immunity isn’t like viruses, but in reverse. It took human beings millennia to refine the strange and subtle gift of natural immunity into vaccines. But that, too, is the living disproof that the naturally immune — and yes, there are some, to every virus — somehow pass their gift on. If they did, why would we have ever needed vaccines? And if they did, what would the mechanism have been? Magic? Fairy dust? We need vaccines precisely to give us the antibodies the naturally immune have. We don’t magically gain them just because there are people who are naturally immune around. That is not what “herd immunity” is.

Actively wanting an entire nation come down with a virus is actually insane. because you believe that it will select some who are naturally immune, and they’ll pass that immunity on to everyone is pseudoscience, quackery, magical thinking — and something worse. It’s monstrous. It’s not just bad science. It’s not even just illogic of the kind a grade-schooler should be able to disprove with a first-grade history textbook. It’s morally negligent. There is no benefit whatsoever to letting a virus rampage through a nation — only a huge, huge price that will be paid, in needless suffering and disease. No kind of natural immunity will emerge because of it. If that had been the case, then presumably the nations hardest hit by, say, polio, would have been immune — but that was never true once in history. Isn’t the sheer scale of this mistake — how colossal it is — obvious when I put it this way? Have you ever heard a policy so flatly absurd? I haven’t.

Let me distill, then, what this repugnant, insane, crackpot idea — “Let’s let the whole nation get infected! Yay! We’ll develop ‘immunity’!!!!!” — really is. It’s a kind of Social Darwinism. But an especially weird one: a magical one. The strong should survive, and the weak perish. In that way, we’re all better off. The fitness of the herd has been increased. So much, so Darwinist.

That much alone would be pretty repellent. But the really surreal thing in this case is that not even that much is true. None of that will happen. The herd won’t be better off just because a pandemic has raged through it. Sure, the weak will have perished, and the strong survived. But that won’t really confer any kind of long-term benefits, like a population somehow magically “resistant” to Coronavirus. It will just make Britain a place where the virus will recur — like Polio did in, say, Pakistan, or Smallpox, in Africa.

A cynic might say something like: that kind of magical Darwinism is useful to a die-hard “conservative.” They want a society based on cruelty, indifference, and violence. A pandemic is the perfect distillation of their core beliefs, really. A subtle, invisible agent, that kills the frail, and leaves the strong standing atop the rest. What could be better than that?

The cynic might even say something like: “Ah, I’m sure the government knows all the above. They’re just using Coronavirus as a pretext for something like social scale mass culling, which is what they’ve always wanted.”

I didn’t used to be such a person — a cynic, conspiratorially minded, suspicious. But I have to confess: watching the British government actually want their nation to come down with Coronavirus is doing a pretty good job of making me one. How stupid do you have to be to want your entire nation to fall ill with a deadly virus? I can’t believe anyone’s that dumb, really. I can only believe that they know exactly what they are doing, and why.