PM Mark Rutte and his cabinet ministers fail to take responsibility for their laissez-fair approach to the CoV-2 pandemic. Rutte even manages to DENY what he said in the Address to the Nation two days ago and what his RIVM director has been preaching for weeks. "No, herd-immunity was not a goal in attacking the coronavirus, it was a product of our option."

In his Address to the Nation on Monday:

Kijk live mee met de toespraak van minister-president Rutte over de stand van zaken rond het #coronavirus ⬇ [_link]

— Mark Rutte (@MinPres) March 16, 2020

The reality is that the coronavirus is among us and will remain among us for the time being. There is no easy or quick way ou of this very difficult situation. The reality is that in the near future a large part of the Dutch population will be infected with the virus.

That is what the experts are telling us now. And what they also tell us is that, pending a vaccine or medicine, we can slow down the spread of the virus while at the same time building group immunity in a controlled way.

I have to explain that.

Those who have had the virus are usually immune afterwards. Just like in the old days with measles. The larger the group that is immune, the less chance that the virus will jump to vulnerable elderly people and people with poor health. With group immunity you build, as it were, a protective wall around them.

That is the principle. But we have to realize that it can take months or even longer to build up group immunity and during that time we need to shield people who are at greater risk as much as possible.

Asscher (PvdA) legt vinger op zere plek: "Na de toespraak van Rutte is het probleem ontstaan dat groepsimmuniteit het doel is. Dat was de bedoeling niet, maar zo is het wel overgekomen." #coronadebat

— Peter Winterman (@WintermanAD) March 18, 2020

"Asscher (PvdA) puts a finger on the sore spot: After Rutte's speech, the problem arose that group immunity is the goal. That was not the intention, but that is how it came across."

○ Jaap van Dissel appointed as Director of the RIVM Centre for Infectious Disease Control

All his tweets in a timeline ... from outbreak in China from January 21 onwards. Ill prepared and ill informed of the facts. Rutte claims today he was following the lead from WHO ... another BIG lie as I have written just a few days ago!

○ Boris Johnson's Herd Immunity Debacle, Mark Rutte follows suite

○ The Coronovirus in tweets from RIVM - a timeline | Elseviers |