Great Barrington Declaration authors strike back at Collins and Fauci

The Daily Sceptic
Wed, 05 Jan 2022 17:10 UTC

© Taleed Brown/Wikimedia Commons

Authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (L-R) : Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya at the American Institute for Economic Research, Great Barrington, MA.

A few weeks ago, emails obtained via FOI request revealed how America's most senior government scientists sought to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration. In particular, the email below was sent by Francis Collins (former director of the National Institutes of Health) to Anthony Fauci:

Amazingly, Collins refers to the authors of the Declaration as "three fringe epidemiologists", despite the fact that they held positions at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford respectively. (If even Harvard professors are considered "fringe", there isn't much hope for the rest of us...)

© Francis Collins

The use of "fringe" is particularly egregious when you consider that lockdowns represent a radical departure from the pre-Covid science. As Fauci himself stated on the January 24th last year: "Historically when you shut things down it doesn't have a major effect."

Collins then wrote, "There needs to be a quick and devastating takedown of its premise." Which sounds like the sort of thing a PR consultant would say - not a supposedly neutral scientist. Further details of the exchange can be found in this article by Phil Magness, who actually obtained the emails.

Now two of the Great Barrington authors have hit back at Collins and Fauci. Writing in the Epoch Times, Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya say that their critics "got the pandemic strategy they advocated for, and they own the results". As the two professors explain:

Lockdowns protected young low-risk affluent work-from-home professionals, such as administrators, scientists, professors, journalists, and lawyers, while older high-risk members of the working class were exposed and died in unnecessarily high numbers. This failure to understand that lockdowns could not protect the vulnerable led to the tragically high death counts from Covid.

Kulldorff and Bhattacharya's piece offers a clear and forthright defence of the Great Barrington Declaration. Worth reading in full.

Comment: From the Epoch Times article:

Collins and Fauci played critical roles in designing and advocating for the pandemic lockdown strategy adopted by the United States and many other countries. In emails written four days after the Great Barrington Declaration and disclosed recently after a FOIA request, it was revealed that the two conspired to undermine the declaration. Rather than engaging in scientific discourse, they authorized "a quick and devastating published takedown" of this proposal, which they characterized as by "three fringe epidemiologists" from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford.

Across the pond, they were joined by their close colleague, Dr. Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world's largest nongovernmental funders of medical research. He worked with Dominic Cummings, the political strategist of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Together, they orchestrated "an aggressive press campaign against those behind the Great Barrington Declaration and others opposed to blanket COVID-19 restrictions."

Ignoring the call for focused protection of the vulnerable, Collins and Fauci purposely mischaracterized the GBD as a "let-it-rip" "herd immunity strategy," even though focused protection is the very opposite of a let-it-rip strategy. It's more appropriate to call the lockdown strategy that has been followed a "let-it-rip" strategy. Without focused protection, every age group will eventually be exposed in equal proportion, albeit at a prolonged "let-it-drip" pace compared to a do-nothing strategy.

When journalists started asking us why we wanted to "let the virus rip," we were puzzled. Those words aren't in the GBD, and they are contrary to the central idea of focused protection. It's unclear whether Collins and Fauci ever read the GBD, whether they deliberately mischaracterized it, or whether their understanding of epidemiology and public health is more limited than we had thought. In any case, it was a lie.

We were also puzzled by the mischaracterization of the GBD as a "herd immunity strategy." Herd immunity is a scientifically proven phenomenon, as fundamental in infectious disease epidemiology as gravity is in physics. Every COVID strategy leads to herd immunity, and the pandemic ends when a sufficient number of people have immunity through either COVID-recovery or a vaccine. It makes as much sense to claim that an epidemiologist is advocating for a "herd immunity strategy" as it does to claim that a pilot is advocating a "gravity strategy" when landing an airplane. The issue is how to land the plane safely, and whatever strategy the pilot uses, gravity ensures that the plane will eventually return to earth.

The fundamental goal of the GBD is to get through this terrible pandemic with the least harm to the public's health. Health, of course, is broader than just COVID. Any reasonable evaluation of lockdowns should consider their collateral damage to patients with cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other infectious diseases, as well as mental health and much else. Based on long-standing principles of public health, the GBD and focused protection of the high-risk population is a middle ground between devastating lockdowns and a do-nothing, let-it rip strategy.

• Leaked emails show NIH head Collins and Fauci colluding to smear Great Barrington Declaration doctors who called to end lockdowns
• 'Lockdown is a terrible experiment': Interview with Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff
• A defense of the Great Barrington Declaration from its powerful critics
• Authors of Great Barrington Declaration got it right — Lockdowns were a disaster, especially for young people