Michael Hiltzik: These 'experts' sold the U.S. on a disastrous COVID plan, and never paid a professional price

They've held credentials from some of the world's most elite universities — Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Oxford. They've been welcomed into the highest government policy councils. They became fixtures on television news shows and were quoted incessantly by some of the nation's leading newspapers.

They're a cadre of academics and scientists who pushed a discredited solution to the COVID pandemic, shunning masks, school closings, even vaccines, all in the name of reaching the elusive goal of "herd immunity," resulting in what may have been hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths.

That's the contention of "We Want Them Infected," a painstakingly documented new book by Jonathan Howard, a neurologist at New York University and a veteran debunker of the pseudoscience contaminating our efforts to fight the pandemic.

Howard takes his title from Paul Alexander, an epidemiologist in the Health and Human Services Department during the Trump administration.

In July 2020, Alexander offered his view of to discrete populations to reach herd immunity. The idea was that so many people would eventually become naturally infected with the virus, and therefore immune, from further