Great Barrington Declaration of 2020 on the Covid19 Plandemic-Scandemic from Wiki
Great Barrington Declaration
The Great Barrington Declaration is a proposal written and signed at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on 4 October 2020.[1][2] It proposes a libertarian policy for the COVID-19 pandemic, under which only people who are personally at high risk of dying from coronavirus disease would be protected from infection.[3][4]
The declaration advocates that individuals at high risk of death from infection should continue staying at home, and that people at low risk resume their normal lives, by working away from home and attending mass gatherings.[5][6] They hope that as a result most of these lower-risk people will contract the infection but not die, and that the resulting immune response will prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus from spreading to higher-risk people. The declaration makes no mention of social distancing, masks, contact tracing, nor of COVID-19 testing.[4]
Critics of the declaration's recommendations, including academics and the World Health Organization, have stated the proposed strategy is dangerous and unworkable and that it would be impossible to shield those who are medically vulnerable, and that the herd immunity component of the strategy is undermined by the limited duration of post-infection immunity.
The declaration was authored by Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University.[1] It was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank that is part of a Koch-funded network of organizations associated with climate change denial.[7][8]
Declaration contents
The brief declaration advocates a strategy the authors call "focused protection". They want to end stay-at-home orders and other mandatory restrictions on activities.[5][6] Instead, they want individual people, based upon their own perception of their risk of dying from COVID-19 and other personal circumstances, to personally choose the risks, activities and restrictions they prefer.[9] The declaration says that lockdowns have adverse effects on physical and mental health, for example, because people postpone preventive healthcare.[5] The authors say that the focus should instead be on "shielding" those most at risk, with few mandatory restrictions placed on the remainder of the population.[5] They believe that herd immunity (the idea that when enough people become immune, then the virus will stop circulating widely) will eventually make it less likely that high-risk people will be exposed to the virus.[5]
Having been intentionally kept to a short, single-page statement devoid of details "in order to make it more publicly-appealing and accessible",[9] the declaration omits practical details about who should be protected or how they can be protected.[2] It does not mention testing any people outside of nursing homes, does not mention contact tracing, does not mention wearing masks, and does not mention social distancing.[2] It mentions multi-generational households but does not provide any information about how, for example, low-risk people can get infected without putting high-risk members of their household at risk of dying.[2]
The declaration names specific economic changes that the signatories favour: resuming "life as normal", with schools and universities open for in-person teaching and extracurricular activities, re-opening offices, restaurants, and other places of work, and resuming mass gatherings for cultural and athletic activities. By October, many of these things had already happened in some parts of the world,[2] but likewise were being restricted elsewhere; for instance the UK saw quarantines of students, travel advisories, restrictions on meeting other people, and partial closures of schools, pubs and restaurants.[10]
Authors
Sunetra Gupta, an infectious disease epidemiologist, has been a critic of the prevailing COVID-19 pandemic lockdown strategy, arguing that the cost is too high for the poorest in society. She led a group which in March released a widely criticized modelling study suggesting that half the population of the United Kingdom might already have been infected with COVID-19,[11] and in September a study which argued herd immunity thresholds might be lower than expected due to pre-existing immunity in the population.[12] She was one author of a 21 September letter to the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, recommending shielding of vulnerable groups of people rather than the lock-down method of the British government response to the COVID-19 pandemic.[13] On 7 October The Daily Telegraph published an opinion piece by Gupta entitled: "Life can go back to normal if we make it our common goal to achieve herd immunity".[6] Of the declaration's signatories, Gupta said: "we're saying, let's just do this for the three months that it takes for the pathogen to sweep through the population", arguing the situation would be only temporary.[4]
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine whose research focuses on the economics of health care, co-wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal entitled "Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?", which claimed there was little evidence to support shelter-in-place orders and quarantines of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States,[14] and was a lead author of a serology study released in April which suggested that as many as 80,000 residents of Santa Clara County, California might already have been infected.[15] The study and conduct of the research drew wide criticism.[16][17]
Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine and biostatistician, has defended Sweden's response to the pandemic[18] and along with Bhattacharya wrote a Wall Street Journal editorial arguing against testing the young and healthy for SARS-CoV-2.[19] Kulldorf told the National Post that people under 50 years old "should live their normal lives unless they have some known risk factor" while "anybody above 60, whether teacher or bus driver or janitor I think should not be working – if those in their 60s can’t work from home they should be able to take a sabbatical (supported by social security) for three, four or whatever months it takes before there is immunity in the community that will protect everybody".[4] He did not explain what people between these ages should do.[4] While Gupta has said in a promotional video that less vulnerable people should be allowed "to get out there and get infected and build up herd immunity", Kulldorff cautioned against deliberately seeking out infection; he said that "everybody should wash their hands and stay home when sick".[4] Kulldorf disagreed with criticism the plan would lead to more deaths, calling it "nonsense".[4] He said "fewer older people – not zero, but fewer old people – would be infected. But you’ll have more young people infected, and that's going to reduce the mortality."[4]
Meeting with the Trump administration
On 5 October – the day after the date of the declaration – Gupta, Bhattacharya, and Kulldorff met the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, an appointee in the Cabinet of Donald Trump, and the neuroradiologist Scott Atlas, an adviser to the Trump administration's White House Coronavirus Task Force in Washington, D.C.[20] According to Azar, the meeting was held "as part of our commitment to ensure we hear broad and diverse scientific perspectives" and that "we heard strong reinforcement of the Trump Administration's strategy of aggressively protecting the vulnerable while opening schools and the workplace" while according to Kulldorff "we had a very good discussion. He asked many questions, and we put forth our case to protect the people who are vulnerable, and the idea of trying to do lockdowns to eliminate this disease is not realistic".[20] Afterwards Atlas also endorsed the declaration, telling The Hill that the "targeted protection of the vulnerable and opening schools and society policy matches the policy of the President and what I have advised".[20] On the evening of the 5 October, Donald Trump returned to the White House after several nights in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, having undergone treatments for coronavirus disease; he told his followers on social media on his return "don't be afraid of it [COVID-19]".[4][21]
Bhattacharya denied that a herd immunity strategy was recommended by the declaration, saying "a herd immunity strategy better describes the current lockdown policy", explaining "herd immunity is a biological fact so of course we mention it, but it is not our strategy".[20] Gupta said that "the alternative [to herd immunity], which is to keep suppressing the virus, comes at an enormous cost to the poor and to the young and not just in this country [the United States] but worldwide", arguing that the herd immunity threshold for SARS-CoV-2 will be reached in December 2020.[20] Bhattacharya advised that until that time vulnerable people might be housed away from multigenerational households, with government support, saying that "we could do policies that would make those resources available to older people in multigenerational settings for the limited period of time that's necessary until the disease is under control, and after time, they could go back home".[20]
Sponsor
The declaration was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian think tank which receives a substantial part of its funding from its own investments, with holdings valued at US$284 million in a wide range of fossil fuel companies incl. Chevron and ExxonMobil, tobacco giant Philip Morris International, Microsoft, Alphabet Inc. and many other companies.[7][8] It has a balance sheet of US$37 million and in 2018 received a US$68,100 donation from the Koch Foundation.[7][22][2][23][24] AIER describes itself as lobbying for a world "organized according to the principles of pure freedom – in which the role of government is sharply confined to the provision of public goods and individuals can flourish within a truly free market"[25] and as producing "independent, scientific, economic research to educate individuals, thereby advancing their personal interests and those of the nation".[4] Its network of local "Bastiat Society" chapters partners with the Atlas Network, Ayn Rand Institute, Cato Institute, the Charles Koch Institute, and other Koch-funded think tanks.[26][8] AIER statements and publications consistently portray the risks of climate change as minor and manageable, a form of climate change denial.[7]
Signatories
Cosignatories, across disciplines ranging from epidemiology, biostatistics, and public health, through psychiatry and self-harm, to finance and human geography, include Sucharit Bhakdi, Angus Dalgleish, Mike Hulme, David L. Katz, Michael Levitt, GĆ¼lnur MuradoÄlu, David Livermore, Jonas F. Ludvigsson, and Karol Sikora.[1]
Besides those mentioned, initial signatories included a professor of medicine and three professors at the Department of Clinical Microbiology and Immunology at Tel Aviv University; professors emeritus of public health at the University of Arizona, of medical microbiology at the University of Mainz, and of the Indian Statistical Institute; a professor of medical informatics and life course epidemiology and a professor of computational statistics at the University of Edinburgh; a professor of modelling and epidemiology at the University of Oxford's Nuffield Department of Medicine, a professor of psychiatry, behavioural sciences, and biomedical data science at Stanford University School of Medicine; a professor of medical statistics at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School; a professor of paediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine; a professor of genetics at the University of Leicester; an assistant professor at Karolinska Institute; a professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham; a professor of philosophy at the University of York; an associate professor of biostatistics at Baylor University; an associate professor in applied mathematics at the University of Exeter; a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Strathclyde; and a former official of the San Francisco Department of Public Health.[1] On 5 October the declaration was made available to be signed by anyone.[1]
On 9 October 2020 several media outlets reported that dozens of obviously bogus names were among the then 175,000 signatures of support for the declaration, including "Mr Banana Rama", "Dr Johnny Fartpants", "Dr Person Fakename", "Harold Shipman", "Professor Notaf Uckingclue", and "Prof Cominic Dummings".[27][28][29] More than 100 psychotherapists, numerous homeopaths, physiotherapists, massage therapists, and other non-relevant people were found to be signatories, including a performer of Khoomei – a Mongolian style of overtone singing – described as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".[28] In response Jay Bhattacharya regretted that "some people have abused our trust by adding false names", which he supposed was "inevitable", but added that "given the volume of correspondence I have received from medical and public health professionals, as well as scientists and epidemiologists, it is clear that a very large number of experts resonate with the message of the declaration and its call for a focused protection policy".[29] In an interview on October 8, 2020 Jay Bhattacharya, one of the three main signatories, had said that the support they received was overwhelming.[30]
As of 12 October 2020 the Great Barrington Declaration website reported there were over 435,000 signatories.[31]
Reception
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Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, warned against the idea of letting the virus spread in order to achieve herd immunity at an October 12 press briefing, calling the notion "unethical". He said: "herd immunity is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached … Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it."[32][33] Tedros said that trying to achieve herd immunity by letting the virus spread unchecked would be "scientifically and ethically problematic".[32][33] He said that though "there has been some discussion recently about the concept of reaching so-called 'herd immunity' by letting the virus spread", "never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic."[32][33][34]
Writing for Science-Based Medicine, David Gorski said that the Great Barrington Declaration was a form of astroturfing similar to that which had previously been used for AIDS denial and creationism advocacy, but this time being deployed for COVID-19 denial, and amounted in practice to an argument for eugenics. Gorski speculated whether the scientists fronting the declaration were simply being useful idiots for AIER or whether they were actively being "motivated more by ideology than science", but said that the practical effect was that the declaration provided a narrative of scientific division useful for political purposes.[35] The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), at whose meeting the declaration was launched, has been described as a libertarian think tank that has received funding from the Koch Foundation and has previously supported climate change denial.[22][7]
Concerns about the declaration have been issued on behalf of the British Academy of Medical Sciences by its president, Robert Lechler.[36] Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, compared the declaration to "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".[28] The British Prime Minister's Official Spokesperson said that while at 10 Downing Street "we have considered the full range of scientific opinion throughout the course of this pandemic and we will continue to do so", it was "not possible to rely on an unproven assumption that it is possible for people who are at lower risk, should they contract the virus, to avoid subsequently transmitting it to those who are at a higher risk and would face a higher risk of ending up in hospital, or worse in an intensive care unit."[37] The spokesman reiterated that the Chief Medical Adviser to the British Government and Chief Medical Officer for England, Chris Whitty, had stressed that the effects on the rest of the healthcare system were already considered in the formulation of public health advice.[37] British Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock said in the House of Commons that the Great Barrington Declaration's two central claims – that widespread infection would lead to herd immunity and that it would be possible to segregate the old and vulnerable – were both "emphatically false".[38]
David Naylor, co-chair of the Government of Canada's COVID-19 Immunity Task Force told the National Post: "obviously, the Great Barrington fix will excite the minimizers who pretend COVID-19 is not much worse than the flu and enliven the libertarians who object to public health measures on principle … So be it: they've been offside all along".[4] Naylor also pointed out that a study published in August in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine examined Sweden's "no-lockdown" policy's effect on herd immunity among the Swedish population, finding it did not improve herd immunity despite higher rates of hospitalization and death than in neighbouring countries.[4][39] According to Naylor, the policy advocated by signatories of the declaration would never be the "controlled demographic burn that some zealots imagine", and because of exponential growth of infections would lead to a situation where "with masses of people sick in their 40s and 50s; hospitals will be over-run and deaths will skyrocket as they did in Italy and New York".[4] With the prospect of a vaccine available within months, Naylor questioned the logic of the Great Barrington strategy, asking: "why on earth should we rush to embrace a reckless prescription for a demographically-selective national 'chickenpox party' involving a dangerous pathogen".[4]
Harvard University professor of epidemiology William Hanage criticized the logic of the declaration's signatories: "After pointing out, correctly, the indirect damage caused by the pandemic, they respond that the answer is to increase the direct damage caused by it", and attacked the feasibility of the idea of "Focused Protection" for those vulnerable to severe infection, saying that "stating that you can keep the virus out of places by testing at a time when the White House has an apparently ongoing outbreak should illustrate how likely that is."[5] He asked, "how would you keep the virus out if 10 percent of the younger population is infected at peak prevalence and with tests that cannot keep the virus out of the White House?"[20] He called the declaration "quite dangerous, for multiple reasons", explaining that "if you do this, you’ll get more infections, more hospitalizations and more deaths" and that "the greatest risk of introduction to the most vulnerable communities will be when the rate of infection is really high in younger age groups."[20] Hanage cautioned that uncontrolled infections among the young run the risk of long-term medical effects of the disease.[5] He added that "we tend to make contacts with people around our own age, and given that none of the older generations would have immunity, they'd be in contact networks at risk of devastating outbreaks" and further explained that blanket lockdowns were not argued for by most experts in any case.[20]
Gregg Gonsalves, assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale University, described the strategy proposed by the declaration as "culling the herd of the sick and disabled", calling it "grotesque".[40] Arguing nearly half the American population is considered to have underlying risk factors for the infection, he advocated for the prevailing quarantine strategy, since peaks in infection rates among the young were likely to correlate with deaths of more vulnerable older people.[20] He wrote: "if you're going to turbo-charge community spread, as everyone else at 'low-risk' goes about their business, I want the plan for my 86-year-old mother to be more than theoretical."[20]
The Francis Crick Institute's group leader of the cell biology of infection laboratory, Rupert Beale, said herd immunity is "very unlikely" to be built up before a COVID-19 vaccine is generally implemented.[41][37] Of the Great Barrington Declaration he said the "declaration prioritises just one aspect of a sensible strategy – protecting the vulnerable – and suggests we can safely build up 'herd immunity' in the rest of the population. This is wishful thinking. It is not possible to fully identify vulnerable individuals, and it is not possible to fully isolate them. Furthermore, we know that immunity to coronaviruses wanes over time, and re-infection is possible – so lasting protection of vulnerable individuals by establishing 'herd immunity' is very unlikely to be achieved in the absence of a vaccine."[41][37] Beale described the declaration as "not a helpful contribution to the debate".[37]
Devi Sridhar, the University of Edinburgh's professor of global public health said that the declaration "sounds good in theory" but that "if you actually work in practical public health on the front line, it doesn't make much sense", saying the declaration's premise was neither "accurate" nor "scientific".[42] Michael Head, senior research fellow in global health at University of Southampton, said the declaration was "a very bad idea" and doubted if vulnerable people could avoid the virus if it were allowed to spread.[27] He also said "ultimately, the Barrington Declaration is based on principles that are dangerous to national and global public health".[27] He said: "there are countries who are managing the pandemic relatively well, including South Korea and New Zealand, and their strategies do not include simply letting the virus run wild whilst hoping that the asthmatic community and the elderly can find somewhere to hide for 12 months".[4][7] Associate professor at the University of Leeds's School of Medicine Stephen Griffin criticized the declaration's flaws in ethics, logistics, and science, pointing out the risk of long-term effects of infection in even those less vulnerable to severe infection.[43] He said: "ethically, history has taught us that the notion of segregating society, even perhaps with good initial intentions, usually ends in suffering".[44] Cellular biologist of the University of Reading questioned whether herd immunity was possible for SARS-CoV-2: "natural, lasting, protective immunity to the disease would be needed, and we don't know how effective or long-lasting people's post-infection immunity will be".[43]
Matt Strauss, a physician and professor of Queen's School of Medicine at Ontario's Queen's University at Kingston and one of the co-signatories, said that most medical professionals he had spoken to agree that current lockdown and isolation policies "do more harm than good". He also said he thought his was not a minority opinion among his colleagues.[45] University of Montreal's paediatrics and clinical ethics professor, Annie Janvier, a co-signatory and part of a group of Quebec scientists critical of the Government of Quebec's response to the provincial epidemic, said that "it's not science that seems to be leading what's going on with COVID, it's public opinion and politics". She criticized the current lockdown measures in Canada saying that right now the vulnerable are not protected.[45] David Livermore, professor of medical microbiology at the University of East Anglia explained his decision to sign the declaration, saying that "never in history have we handled a pandemic like this" and that "future generations will look back aghast".[46] Co-signatory Ellen Townsed, professor of psychology and leader of the self harm research group at the University of Nottingham, emphasised mental health concerns, stating that "one policy decision that could have the most significant impact for young people to protect their mental health both now and in the future, would be to release them from the lockdown as soon as possible".[47]
In the United States, the Trump administration has been reported to support the Great Barrington Declaration, based on statements made to Newsweek and other publications by senior advisers that were not authorized to speak on the record.[48]
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