I Remain Continually Grateful for the Great Barrington Declaration
A year in, it has been proven correct, and it remains relevant today.
A year ago, on Sunday October 4th, 2020 three prestigious epidemiologists met in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and signed a statement which would forever alter the policy debate over the response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Great Barrington Declaration is a simple one page document which can best be summarized in two words: Focused Protection.
Instead of shutting down society, and employing destructive lockdowns and public restrictions in a futile attempt to prevent all spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the Declaration called for protecting the most vulnerable members of society while allowing those not vulnerable to immediately resume life as normal. This is possible because “the vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than 1,000 fold higher in the old and infirm than the young.” As immunity then builds in the population, the risk of infection to all falls. The goal, as these epidemiologists saw it, should be, “to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.”
This may not sound as shocking now as it did then, but it bears recalling the state of our nation at the time. Nearly every state in the country was still under some form of lockdown, with large events cancelled, restrictions in place on nearly all indoor gatherings, with a web of new regulations strangling businesses, and ubiquitous mask mandates. Possibly the greatest injustice of all, schools were closed and “remote only” over more than half the country. The Great Barrington Declaration stood in stark contrast to the consensus of our public health establishment. Yet, it’s not nearly as extreme as that makes it sound.
If you peruse various per-2020 pandemic planning literature, such as the WHO 2019 Pandemic Plan or the CDC’s Pandemic Prevention Plan from 2017, you’ll find the guidance in these plans aligns much more closely to that of the Declaration than it does to the lockdown, “stop the spread” philosophy abruptly adopted in March 2020. Lockdowns were unthinkable pre-2020 and never recommended, school closures were intended to be targeted and brief, not indefinite, and none of these plans recommended mandating face mask use by well persons in public.
Thus, given the shakeup that the Declaration represented, it had to be responded to. From the beginning of the pandemic up until that moment there was near unanimous consent for our government’s actions from the epidemiologist community, and errant voices could be shrugged off as mire quacks. But now there were three decorated scientists from the most prestigious universities of Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford, backed by thousands of additional signers from the medical community, standing up to say that our pandemic response was deeply flawed. The response was swift and incessant.
The entire corporated media apparatus became fixated on discrediting the Declaration. Many critiques centered on conflating the Declaration not as a strategy of “Focused Protection”, but as a “Herd Immunity Strategy'', such as this Vox piece claiming that the GBD’s herd immunity “strategy was a nightmare”. They claimed it was dangerous, unethical, and anti-scientific to craft any pandemic strategy that tolerated virus spread among the less vulnerable.
But as signer Dr. Martin Kulldorff would say, “Herd immunity is not a strategy, it’s a fact of nature. Attempting to end a pandemic without herd immunity would be like attempting to land a plane without gravity.”
I love this analogy. You can think of living through a pandemic as flying a plane with no engine. The crisis ends when you land (reach herd immunity). You can attempt to glide to a safe landing spot, losing altitude incrementally (GBD), or you can attempt to maintain altitude in a vain attempt to never have to land (Lockdown).
Not satisfied with attacking the GBD on the merits, other journalists tried to discredit the document as funded by “Right Wingers” and libertarians. This even as the signers come from diverse political backgrounds and literally say so in the second paragraph of the declaration.
The backlash went so far as to have the Declaration “fact checked” by Politifact. Leave it to a 20-something journo at Politifact to correct the record of Ivy League Epidemiologists…
And the link to the Great Barrington Delcaration’s Website was briefly censored by Google! When users searched for the Declaration, instead of the website link they were directed to the articles and hit-pieces critical of the work.
All of the negative media coverage toward the GBD can be compared against the coverage directed towards another open document from epidemiologists, the John Snow Memo. Written as a direct response to the Great Barrington Declaration it was first published in The Lancet and then saw glowing media coverage. But delve into its content and you will find serious flaws.
The document praised the responses taken by countries like Japan, Vietnam and New Zealand, as models for how we should respond to Covid. As we’ve seen since, none of these countries have ended their lockdowns, and they appear to have no foreseeable exit strategy. The memo also advocated that face masks were a useful tool to mitigate transmission and that testing and contact tracing were critical to controlling the epidemic. As is clear by now, the usefulness of masks is highly overstated, and contact tracing this late in the epidemic is a fool's errand.
And most glaring of all, the John Snow Memo denies the existence of natural immunity from prior infection, essentially arguing that unlike every other pandemic in human history, this one would remain a forever pandemic until the invention of a sterilizing vaccine. This is a denial of natural biological law, or as Martin Kuldorff might put it, a denial of gravity…
It’s amazing just how flawed the John Snow Memo was. And this should have been known at the time, as it’s tenets run counter to all prior pandemic plans. By comparison the Great Barrington Declaration stands up as well now as it did the day it was signed.
Unfortunately, what has played out over the last year since these competing memos were written, is not a story of success. Backed by the media and most governments, most countries and states went the John Snow route and made a futile effort to lock back down and try to stop the virus. My state of California had one of the strictest lockdown’s of any state over the winter of 2020 and what good it did us. Try as we might, our state saw some of the highest viral spread through the winter months and this was exacerbated by the terrible effects on society of the lockdown itself.
On the contrary, states like Florida, and countries like Sweden carved a path much more in line with the GBD, and the results as measured by covid mortality are nearly indistinguishable.
What is not indistinguishable are the damages caused by lockdown which are not present in the places which avoided lockdown. California leads the nation in poverty and unemployment, and our children lost over a year of quality education.
So here we are, one year in, what should we do going forward? The fact of the matter is the Great Barrington Declaration was proven correct. What lessons can we take from it to best direct our pandemic response as we enter another winter?
First when it comes to lockdowns, we must understand how terribly ineffective they were and how disastrous it would be to employ them again this winter when there are far better alternatives. Based on the surge seen in southern states this summer, we can expect a virus surge in the Northern states this winter, but to try and avoid this with lockdown would be folly. Better to ensure that the most vulnerable members of our society are protected.
We can do that with vaccines, but this brings up another lesson we should learn. Mandates are ineffective, and the current Covid Vaccines mandates are not the answer to our problems. Take for example New York City. They were on the vanguard of establishing vaccine mandates and yet well over a quarter of the city's senior citizens remain unvaccinated. This is one more reason these vaccine mandates are pointless. The people who are at the greatest risk from Covid aren’t affected by the mandates. We would be much better served to eliminate totalitarian controls over the working age population, who are at far less risk from the virus, and instead focus on targeted outreach to senior communities to make sure as many vulnerable people as possible have every opportunity to get vaccinated.
One more lesson would be how to treat our children and young adults, and in particular in schools and colleges. We must come to grips with the fact that our children are not at elevated risk from Covid. Children can live completely normal lives even with Covid present and this applies directly to schooling. Additional school closures this year are inexcusable, and the masking and quarantining measures currently being employed in many schools throughout the country are simply pointless and harmful. We already hear talk of schools needing to close again this winter, and some colleges, such as Harvard Business School, have already resorted to remote learning. Going forward we can’t let this happen. We must make every possible effort to return children’s lives to normality, and avoid the countless harms that have been directed upon them.
Most importantly, we must understand that public health is never about just one virus or just one disease. To chart the best course going forward we must think holistically about how our actions can best limit the damage of the virus while causing the least harm to society at large, and this is exactly what the Great Barrington Declaration advocates for.
It was a very brave act taken by Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, to stand against the public health establishment and demonstrate a better way forward. I know that I myself, and countless millions across this country and across the globe will be forever thankful that they did it.
Anyway 0 and 2…