While President Trump is back on the campaign trail infecting diehards with COVID, he might have daughter Ivanka enroute to rallies read him Edgar Allan Poe’s startlingly prophetic “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842) about plagues. It’s a short tale of a medieval prince—appropriately named “Prince Prospero”—sheltering and entertaining 1,000 royals from the Black Death in his castle lockdown. Yet Death finds them—and him—anyway.

This is the close replica of Trump’s “herd-immunity” policy on handling COVID and explains why he’s done nothing to arrest it.

Almost three centuries ago, economist/demographer Thomas Malthus’ 1826 theory thatwhen humans outgrow food supplies, Nature somehow will “thin the herd,” perhaps with droughts, floods, earthquakes, heat waves, and plagues.

The wealthy and powerful too often have lent Nature a hand with genocidal wars over resources, brutal suppressions of uprisings, and “herd-immunity “ in which rulers do nothing to prevent plagues from killing millions, mostly the poor and sickly from the lower classes. They are regarded as surplus populations and that only the physically and mentally fit deserve life. This view has been underpinned for more than 160 years by observational studies in biologist Charles Darwin ‘s 1859 book On the Origin of Species.

Ignoring the Seventh Commandment, Malthus suggested some depopulation deeds to be visited on the lower classes, something welcome among the wealthy and powerful in any era who despise and fear a rising for how they’ve been treated. Small wonder elitists agreed with Malthus’ genocidal suggestions of his day:

“In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.”

Precedent usually justifies such thinking. Genghis Khan swept through China and Iran, taking at least 40 million lives . Hitler killed 2.7 million , mostly Jews in three concentration camps alone, and other millions considered untermenschen (inferiors). Stalin’s toll even beforeWWII was 10 million peasants in collectivism, tens of millions in political purges. Victims were equated with animals undeserving of human rights or life.

Fast-forward to the herd-immunity policies of Trump and other world leaders to stymie COVID. Most, like Trump, publicly denied using it at first. In September 2019 extraordinary forewarnings about potential global pandemics appeared in the WHO Report of September 2019. It admonished Trump and other “heads of government” to prepare for the “worst” from what could become “a rapidly spreading pandemic due to a lethal respiratory pathogen.” That meant immediately rectifying shortcomings with a medical “Manhattan Project

WHO’s strong warning fell on deaf ears. The Malthusian/Darwinian cabal directing Trump seemed to see only a trillion-dollar windfall from COVID. Industry’s job automations and new directions would make tens of thousand workers superfluous, saving billions in labor costs.

China’s President Warns Trump in Mid-December

Then, in mid-December—despite Trump’s public demonizations of China—its president Xi Jinping confided to him that a COVID pandemic had begun sweeping his country. The first victim , a 55-year-old in Hubei province, was reported on November 17, followed by five daily cases by December 15. He characterized it as deadly, airborne, and “tougher than touch.” His government was to close China’s borders, ban incoming air fights, and on January 23 attempt the world’s first national lockdown until the casualty rates dropped drastically. Masks required!

Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien told him five days later that a COVID pandemic in the U.S. would be the “biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.”

Perhaps with an eye to escape future accusations of such warnings and to launch his secret herd plan, Trump began discrediting WHO as a pandemic source rather than the word of a U.S.president. The idea seemingly was to confuse the country about whom to believe. He was to end U.S. membership and funding in spring for WHO with the staggering lie that it lacked “transparency” about China and COVID. Because casualties were doubling by the day, he needed Americans to believe he was in the front lines.

On February 28, Trump told the public the virus was a Democratic “hoax .” But if it weren’t, he said, his administration was “magnificently organized” and “totally prepared" to address a pandemic.

Four months later at a Rose Garden press conference , Trump’s remarks indicated the government’s storehouses were almost empty and his administration was neither“magnificently organized” nor prepared for a pandemic. Shocked governors learned their states, not the federal government , were responsible for finding and buying medical needs despite significant budget shortfalls.

The CDC by late April was pointing out that because COVID was largely airborne, it recommended wearing masks for indoor or outdoor contacts because people’s outgoing minute droplets spread the virus. Trump refused to wear a mask, signaling it was unmanly.

He also began increasing pressure on employees and school districts to return to jobs and classes with “Opening Up America Again ” commands. But employees and students are the best “super-spreaders,” carrying COVID to cohorts, classmates, families and friends. The infected would pass it on to others and they to others.

Trump finally admitted at a September 12 virtual Philadelphia town hall that his actions about COVID all along had been based on herd-immunity.

House Unit Reports Trump Blocked Experts 47 Times

His lies at long last were exposed October 1, when a litany of Trump efforts to protect his herd-immunity plan by obstructing WHO and CDC information appeared in a well-documented report by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. It listed 47 instances in which he “actively interfered in the nation’s public health response through executive action or public or private pressure….repeatedly overruling and sidelining top scientists” to undermine American’s health.

The result of Trump’s herd policy from January 21 to  October 9, is a COVID toll of 7,583,200 infections and 212,111 deaths. Survivors intubated or given medications are expected to suffer long-time chronic ailments from damage to pulmonary, cardiovascular, and immune systems.

Yet all is not lost in stopping Trump’s genocidal herd-immunity policy. But it will take public awareness that most of us are the “herd” to be culled. Solutions do exist, some of which are suggested below:

First, spread the word about Trump’s herd-immunity plan throughout October by home phone-banking, social media and/or email blast lists.

Second, join any movement designed to get non-voters to change their minds by November 3 or earlier.

Third, until Inauguration Day, do curbside sign-waving (e.g., “Stop Trump’s COVID’s Genocide Policy/ of Herd-Immunity” or “Trump Wants You Dead From COVID”, etc.).

Fourth, organize high school students to stage Saturday noon sidewalk marches carrying anti-herd-immunity signs. Greek high school students by the thousands are the world’s first to peacefully march around the country opposing their government’s herd-immunity policies.

Fifth, advocate redirection of Pentagon allocations to locate and cover purchase of 500 million COVID testing kits and other medical supplies.

Sixth, contact the governor of your state to request the National Guard provide daily deep-cleanings and inspecting ventilation systems at factories, businesses, schools, hospitals, and penal institutions, and . also digging and covering graves.

Seventh, contact six progressive organizations to file genocide charges with the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal (ICT) at The Hague against Trump and his accessories for the herd-immunity policy and the deaths of border detainees in detention facilities. Convictions and executions are done, as the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials demonstrated. Of the 24 Nazi leaders indicted, 10 were hanged, one committed suicide before hanging, and 10 drew five-to-life prison terms. In 2002, Yugoslavia’s former president Slobodan Milošević was charged with 66 collective counts of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Just before the verdict was reached, he died of a heart attack in prison.

Eighth , start a boycott of COVID vaccines developed by crash-programs which are nowto be rushed into a Trump-enforced approval by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) from his August Executive Order to relax clinical test standards.

The call is sounding for immediate action to stop Trump’s criminal herd-immunity policy. If nothing is done, COVID’s survivors will be “little more than digital slaves” in a “new Empire,” says Vandana Shiva , a noted Indian scientist and agricultural activist. As she says:

“We stand at a precipice of extinction. Will we allow our humanity as living, conscious, intelligent, autonomous beings to be extinguished by a greed machine that does not know limits and is unable to put a break on its colonisation and destruction? Or will we stop the machine and defend our humanity, freedom, and autonomy to protect life on earth?”

Let each of us stop Trump’s herd-immunity plan by taking at least one  action every week until the Inauguration January 20.

Barbara G. Ellis, Ph.D., is the principal of a Portland (OR) writing firm. A veteran professional writer and editor (LIFE magazine, Beirut Daily Star, Mideast Magazine, International Medical News Group), she also was a journalism professor (Oregon State University/Louisiana’s McNeese State University). Author of dozens of articles for magazines and online websites, she was a nominee for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history (The Moving Appeal). Today, she contributes to Truthout and Counterpunch, RSN, DissidentVoice, Global Research, and OpEdNews, as well as being a political and environmental activist.