A month after Berenson, former President Trump was on the case, calling for a “herd mentality,” which was pushed by Trump’s quack adviser Dr. Scott Atlas. Atlas was telling White House colleagues that “we want them infected” and, of course, advocating the most sociopathic stance imaginable lifted him in the then-president’s esteem. This past December, following Trump’s humiliating defeat, the lame duck was still talking about how “terrific” it was that so many people had contracted COVID since it meant we were on track to reach herd.

The late Rush Limbaugh was also an advocate for herd immunity. In fact, he thought it had already been achieved in May 2020. Half a million deaths later, that seems to have been a miscalculation. But after Rush went down to his eternal rest, the dittoheads did not have their herd priors challenged. His time slot was filled by amateur epidemiologist Clay Travis, who had previously gained success as a blogger who specialized in boobs and sports talk. Travis, who once predicted that there would be only a “few hundred” deaths from COVID—making him a gentleman’s 100,000-200,000 percent off from the current total—was one of America’s leading advocates for herd immunity. Only Berenson’s MJ-in-’96 level of dominance protected Travis from the wrongest-man title.

In April 2020, Travis was on the Sweden bandwagon and using his newfound Wikipedia University bachelor’s degree in public health determined that the Swedes were well on their way to herd. By July, he projected that New York City and other parts of the United States were joining them and were either “at” or “moving close to” herd immunity themselves. In August he expertly observed that the rapid decline of the virus “does make you wonder if herd immunity hit” in the American South. (Spoiler: It had not.) By February 2021, Dr. Travis had finally seen enough to declare, “We’ve hit herd immunity and COVID will be over by the end of April.”