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Can We Really Achieve ‘Herd Immunity’?

Gregg Gonsalves on Covid-19, plus Allissa Richardson on Black cell-phone videos.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

October 15, 2020

A swab is unwrapped at the Newton Wellesley Hospital COVID-19 testing site in Newton, Mass.(Suzanne Kreiter / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

A group of scientists are calling it “The Great Barrington Declaration”—a strategy to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic by age-targeted reopening. The advocates call it “focused protection”; they say it would create herd immunity. Gregg Gonsalves argues that it will not—and that “we can do better.”

Also: Cell-phone videos of police killing Black people have had an immense political impact over the last couple of years. Allissa Richardson comments on the videos and the new Black protest journalism, based largely on Twitter. Her new book is Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism.

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Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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