Dr. Anthony Fauci on Thursday denounced the concept of herd immunity — the notion that if a large enough group of people contract an infection, it will ultimately stop the disease from spreading — calling it “nonsense” during an interview with Yahoo News.

“Anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that is nonsense and very dangerous,” Fauci told Yahoo News, “because what will happen is that if you do that, by the time you get to herd immunity, you will have killed a lot of people that would have been avoidable.”…

“We talk about a second wave,” he said, “we’ve never really gotten out of the first wave. If you look at the baseline number of daily infections that we have had over the last several weeks [it’s] been around 40,000 per day. It’s now gone up to about 50,000 per day. So right away, we have a very unfortunate baseline from which we need to deal.”