The government’s infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, decried the support for the nation to adopt a “herd immunity” strategy that has become the favored tactic of the White House to battle the coronavirus, CNBC reports.

“I’ll tell you exactly how I feel about that. If you let infections rip as it were and say, ‘Let everybody get infected that’s going to be able to get infected and then we’ll have herd immunity.’ Quite frankly that is nonsense, and anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that that is nonsense and very dangerous,” Fauci told Yahoo! News.

The idea of herd immunity means that at least 60-80% of people gain an immunity to the disease in order to protect the entire population.  Hot spots would be restricted in the future to try to control future outbreaks.

In most rational scenarios, that percentage is reached through the use of vaccines.  Trump’s favored advisors, led by Stanford Institution and Fox “News” commentator, neuroradiologist Scott Atlas, want to rescind all public safety measures and allow the virus to sweep through the population, taking nominal steps to protect the elderly and immunocompromised.

“By the time you get to herd immunity you will have killed a lot of people that would’ve been avoidable,” he said.

Experts in the field of public health and epidemiology estimate that 4 to 6 million Americans would die before 60% of the people became infected, plus there is no guarantee that exposure to the virus provides long-term immunity.