Between now and November 3rd, we'll hear questions never raised before in a campaign for the White House.

One is the impact of athletes in the National Basketball Association and other professional sports

going all out for Black Lives Matter. Will there be a white backlash that benefits President Trump? We'll

hear about that later. First, what's the latest on COVID-19? President Trump started out with

outright denial. Since then, he and other Republicans have treated it like a thing of the past,

but of course, it's still with us, very much with us. Andy Slavitt was acting administrator

for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the Obama administration. Now he's a

podcaster at In the Bubble, where he reports the latest on the pandemic. Andy, welcome back to our

podcast. It's great to be here, Warren. We don't hear from the White House Task Force anymore, and the president now has a new advisor, Scott Atlas, who is an advocate of what's called herd immunity.

We've all heard about it, but what is it?

So we have hundreds of people a day still dying from COVID-19.

Some things have gotten a little bit better

since the start. The rate in which people are dying is lower, and that's a good thing. But

the virus is still spreading out of control. It's still, in fact, it only small parts of the

population. Herd immunity is a concept which basically says when enough people have the virus, it will

stop spreading this rapidly.

And in the context of a vaccine, herd immunity is exactly what we want.

We want people to get a herd immunity without having people having to suffer.

The herd immunity that Scott Atlas talks about is quite different and is quite dangerous because,

you know, in effect, what it is is not herd immunity, but herd thinning. Because what it suggests is that we ought to let the virus roam freely so that more people

can get it.

And along with that, there is some sort of implied acceptable death rate that would come.

...