Anthony Fauci’s penchant for misleading the public about COVID-19 may
be heading into a federal courtroom soon, owing to a lawsuit brought by
the Attorneys General of Missouri, Louisiana, and the New Civil
Liberties Alliance. On November 23, 2022, Fauci sat for a sworn
deposition about his own actions in directing the United States’
pandemic response. Consistent with his past media appearances, Fauci
displayed a penchant for bending the truth to fit his own narrative and,
more specifically, denied his own involvement in suppressing the Great
Barrington Declaration (GBD) in October 2020. Only this time, it was
under oath.
Just about a year ago, on the anniversary date of October 5, 2021 to
be exact, we took what we thought would be our retrospective and dispassionate look at the GBD, as lockdowns dissipated and mask mandates faded away. Two months later, AIER discovered a shocking revelation
in emails received from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to
Fauci’s office. In early October of 2020, Dr. Francis Collins, then
Director of the National Institutes of Health, ordered Fauci and his
trusted lieutenant Clifford Lane to wage “a quick and devastating
published take down (sic)” of the Great Barrington Declaration’s
premises..............
And it’s really not much of a surprise now that Fauci wants to forget
about all of this. It’s unseemly after all, that the Representative of
Science would target fellow scientists trying only to do their jobs. But
he will not be able to brush this mess under the carpet in his
retirement from the NIH. As his recent performance in the sworn
deposition indicates, Fauci’s evasions leave us with more questions than
answers – and more clues that he used his position as a top official at
a powerful government agency to persecute and suppress dissenting
scientific beliefs............To Read More....
SOMERS, Connecticut – Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D. told attendees at Hillsdale College’s Blake Center for Faith and Freedom
Thursday evening that government health agencies that forced lockdowns
and coerced mass vaccinations to manage the COVID-19 pandemic have
thrown the basic principles of public health “out the window.”
Swedish native Kulldorff, who is on leave from Harvard University and is a founding fellow of Hillsdale’s Academy for Science and Freedom, is also a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration,
a document published in October 2020 that has since been translated
into 44 languages and signed by nearly 1 million scientists, physicians,
and citizens.
The Declaration, also co-authored by Oxford University’s Dr. Sunetra
Gupta and Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, expresses the “grave
concerns” of infectious disease epidemiologists and public health
scientists regarding the “damaging physical and mental health impacts of
the prevailing COVID-19 policies,” specifically the lockdowns, which,
the authors warned two years ago, were already “producing devastating
effects on short and long-term public health.”.............To Read More....
From October 2-4, 2020, the American Institute for Economic Research
hosted a small conference for scientists to discuss the harms of the
Covid-19 lockdowns, and maybe hint at a path back to normal life.
Organized by Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya, the
conference made a scientific case
for shifting away from the heavy-handed lockdowns of the initial Spring
2020 outbreak. On their final day together in Great Barrington, the
scientists wrote a short statement of principles, calling it the Great
Barrington Declaration. This Declaration, their Declaration, touched a
nerve well beyond the scientific community, and well beyond anything
they or AIER could have expected. So here we are, a year later. Where do
we stand?
The aim that our guests had in offering the Great Barrington
Declaration was to spark scientific dialogue that had been missing from
the lockdown discussions until that point. It was AIER’s goal to
facilitate this dialogue. The Declaration was a success in bringing, for
the first time since the pandemic started, an anti-lockdown voice to
mainstream policy discussion. The signatories’ stance was generally in line with the pre-pandemic plans that many, if not most mainstream authorities, (the World Health Organization, the epidemiology center at Johns Hopkins University, and the Centers for Disease Control to name just three) held. People tend to forget what the pre-2020 conventional wisdom on pandemics even was.
As successful as we think the Great Barrington Declaration was, it
failed in a number of respects as well. We did not, for example,
anticipate the vilification the Declaration would receive from any
number of people, ranging from the progressive left to self-described
libertarians.
Immediately after the website launched, it was hit by a hoax signature campaign
instigated on Twitter by pro-lockdown journalist Nafeez Ahmed. Most of
the fake signatures were caught within hours and removed, but not before
a hostile news media used them to manufacture a false story about their own self-created controversy over signatures from “Dr. Johnny Bananas” and similar easily-caught pseudonyms.
Not to be outdone by his first stunt, Ahmed also let loose what can
only be called a flurry of increasingly unhinged conspiracy theories,
falsely alleging that the GBD was somehow financially orchestrated by
the Koch brothers, the British Ministry of Defence, and even a resort
hotel property in Wales. Although Ahmed has a long history of conspiracy
theorizing including the promotion of kooky claims about a controlled demolition bringing down the Twin Towers on 9/11, his ravings about the GBD were credulously adopted and shared
by prominent scientists, journalists, and any number of other people
who should have known better. (For the record, AIER received $68,000 in
Koch funding over the last ten years. And that sum was used entirely to
offset the costs of a single economics conference in 2017, with no links
whatsoever to the GBD). It’s much easier to demonize an opponent by
accusing them of being on the payroll of “dark money” than it is to
engage their arguments on a substantive and scientific evidentiary
basis.
The Declaration even came under attack from a targeted propaganda campaign at the highest levels of the British government.
Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust and a pro-lockdown
advisor to the UK’s SAGE committee, revealed as much in a recent book
about the pandemic. Per Farrar’s account, Dominic Cummings – then
serving as chief advisor to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson – announced
that he would orchestrate “an aggressive press campaign against those
behind the Great Barrington Declaration and to others opposed to blanket
Covid-19 restrictions,” seeking to discredit any scientist who
questioned the wisdom of his government’s lockdown strategy.
In a broader and more basic sense, the Declaration was written during
a period of deep uncertainty. No one really knew what the correct Covid
answers were, but the signatories followed the evidence as it emerged.
Most importantly, no one had any way of knowing that vaccines were so
close to being available to the public. And while the specific
strategies of last fall and winter might well have been different had
the signatories known what we know now, everything they wrote was
compatible with the anti-lockdown message at the heart of the
Declaration.
So how well did the lockdowns perform in practice? Given the intense
criticisms leveled at the GBD, one might be inclined to think they
worked rather well.
But they didn’t. Not by a long shot.
First consider how the lockdowners have continuously shifted their
accounts of the very same policies they advocated. In the weeks that
followed the GBD, its critics crafted a well-honed and widely repeated
message. Lockdowns, they insisted, were already a relic of the past –
perhaps a suitable strategy for the uncertainties of spring 2020’s
“first wave,” but no longer a serious consideration given what we came
to know about the virus. When the GBD questioned the efficacy of
lockdowns, they insisted, it was arguing against a “strawman.”
“The kind of lockdown that the Great Barrington Declaration seems to
be railing against hasn’t been in place in the UK since mid-June,” read one retort in UK Wired Magazine
only two days after the GBD website went live. “When the Great
Barrington Declaration authors declare their opposition to lockdowns,
they are quite literally arguing with the past.” Economist Tyler Cowen echoed the charge in a Bloomberg column
devoted to attacking the GBD on October 15, 2020: “The critics who
emphasize lockdowns are setting up a straw man,” he wrote. “What they’re
trying to do is talk us into something more dangerous than what we
ought to accept. The truth is that lockdowns are extremely unpopular,
and while they may have to be reimposed in extreme circumstances, they
are not the main alternative on the table in the U.S. right now.”
After a year and a half or so of lockdowns, we can safely dismiss
this response. Less than a month later, the UK returned to full
lockdown. Dozens of other countries around the world followed suit in
mid-November. When cases spiked again in the United States over the
winter, several states reimposed these very same “strawman” lockdown
policies that the GBD’s critics dismissed with a wave of their hands in
mid-October.
Not that any of them would ever admit as much now. Quite the
contrary, by early 2021 many of the same scientific commentators and
epidemiologists who deployed the “strawman” line against the GBD the
previous October had taken to revising the history of their own
arguments and claims. One new conspiracy theory even faulted the GBD’s authors
for allegedly delaying the reimposition of another UK lockdown by a few
weeks the previous fall. In October 2020, British epidemiologist Deepti
Gurdasani dismissed the GBD’s warnings about renewed lockdowns as “a
strawman that the science is not only not advocating for, but very keen
to avoid.” By January 2021 she not only claimed to have supported a
“circuit breaker” lockdown as early as the previous September – she also
blamed the GBD authors for impeding its adoption.
Yes, you read
that right. Lockdowns were just a “strawman” that nobody was seriously
pushing for at the time the GBD was signed, but the GBD was also somehow
responsible for delaying the reimposition of the very same lockdowns
that nobody – allegedly – wanted. Clearly, certain scientists were being
less-than-forthright about their intentions to lock down again in the
fall of 2020. But rather than admit these errors, they turned to
scapegoating the one document that correctly diagnosed their intentions.
More pro-lockdown epidemiologists seemed inclined to grasp the central theme of the badly misnamedJohn Snow Memorandum in the Lancet
– drafted in direct response to the GBD. This petition, co-organized by
Gurdasani and other pro-lockdown scientists, predictably claimed that
drastic nonpharmaceutical measures such as business closures and
shelter-in-place orders had a large effect on reducing Covid
transmission in the spring and summer of 2020. Recent data indicate that this statement is overblown,
and common sense should have researchers looking for the tradeoffs that
have to be made in these sorts of large-scale public policies. Be that
as it may, the Snow Memorandum was built upon unreliable pro-lockdown studies out of Imperial College-London that have since been discredited.
Another major claim of the Snow Memorandum – that naturally acquired
immunity was not robust and Covid-19 reinfections among recovered
patients could become widespread – turned out to be incorrect. The best
evidence we now have suggests that naturally acquired immunity is very robust. To date, neither the Snow Memorandum authors nor the Lancet have issued an appropriate correction to their erroneous claim.
Most importantly, the main epidemiology model driving the world’s Covid-19 responseperformed disastrously at predicting the actual course
of the disease. In March 2020, Neil Ferguson’s epidemiology team at
Imperial College-London published mortality projections for 189
different countries, based on an array of model scenarios. They missed
every single projection at the 1-year mark in 189 out of 189 countries,
in both their “do nothing” and “mitigation” scenarios, as well as in 170
out of 189 countries in their most extreme “suppression” scenario – a
policy response that no country on earth adopted.
Table I: Imperial College Covid-19 Mortality Projection Model – One-Year Performance Record (3/26/2020 – 3/26/2021)
ICL Model
Model Assumptions
# Countries Over-est.
# Countries Under-est.
Max Mortality Over-est. %
Min Mortality Over-est. %
Median Over-est. %
Unmitigated spread
No policy interventions taken
189
0
1,798,180%
137%
1,983%
Mitigation
Mandatory population-wide social distancing, assumed R0 = 2.4
189
0
937,020%
21%
1,041%
Suppression
75% reduction in contacts until full vaccination, assumed R0 = 3
170
19
360,610%
-57%
535%
That Ferguson’s model could be so completely wrong, and yet remain so
influential is itself astonishing. But when we learned that Neil
Ferguson himself was found to be violating the lockdown order that he
had a decisive hand in creating, everyone should have realized that
something fishy was afoot.
The last vestige of the lockdown policy, Zero Covid, has been an
unmitigated disaster. Indeed, New Zealand and Australia tried and failed
to stop the virus with extremely aggressive lockdowns in
August/September 2021, and are now set to abandon the ham-fisted
policies altogether. And while these terrible policies might well be
relegated to the ash heap of history, the memory of menacing, black-clad
stormtroopers marching through the streets of Melbourne, asking people
why they were out of doors, will remain.
So through it all, what have we learned and what should come next?
First, vaccines have been a game changer, and will continue to be so. A
forthcoming Covid-19 treatment pill from Merck might well be even
bigger. And there are certainly other treatments coming that we don’t
know about yet, that will only emerge through the innovative processes
of scientific discovery.
Also unknown at present are the costs of the lockdowns. These will be
felt for years, if not decades, and will go well beyond lost wages.
What will all those foregone cancer screenings mean, in the end? What
about all those people who suffered mental health crises as they were
confined to their homes alone? What about substance abuse costs? And
what of the various financial catastrophes that so many people suffered?
The benefits of the lockdowns are still ambiguous at best, this after
a year and a half. We still have no clear empirical evidence that they
delivered anything close to what they promised. But because science has
been so completely politicized, it will take years longer to arrive at
the truth than would have otherwise been the case. Here, we are left to
offer advice with a nearly 2,500-year track record: First, do no harm.
Phillip W. Magness is Senior Research
Faculty and Interim Research and Education Director at the American
Institute for Economic Research. He holds a PhD and MPP from George
Mason University’s School of Public Policy, and a BA from the University
of St. Thomas (Houston).
Prior to joining AIER, Dr. Magness spent over a decade teaching
public policy, economics, and international trade at institutions
including American University, George Mason University, and Berry
College.
Magness’s work encompasses the economic history of the United States
and Atlantic world, with specializations in the economic dimensions of
slavery and racial discrimination, the history of taxation, and
measurements of economic inequality over time. He also maintains active
research interest in higher education policy and the history of economic
thought. In addition to his scholarship, Magness’s popular writings
have appeared in numerous venues including the Wall Street Journal, the
New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, Reason, National Review, and the
Chronicle of Higher Education.
James R. Harrigan is Senior Editor at AIER. He is also co-host of the Words & Numbers podcast.
Dr. Harrigan was previously Dean of the American University of
Iraq-Sulaimani, and later served as Director of Academic Programs at the
Institute for Humane Studies and Strata, where he was also a Senior
Research Fellow.
He has written extensively for the popular press, with articles
appearing in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, U.S. News and World
Report, and a host of other outlets. He is also co-author of Cooperation
& Coercion. His current work focuses on the intersections between
political economy, public policy, and political philosophy.
Get notified of new articles from James R. Harrigan and AIER.
In the last few years, AIER has become a global economic policy
powerhouse. Some of the architects of that house have moved on to build
other edifices but what they have built here remains imposing. We know
that because of who continues to attack us, including the CCP via DoS
attacks and the highest levels of the British government via a smear
campaign against AIER and the three eminent authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). Yes, the British government.
Although then a frequent contributor to AIER’s Daily Economy website,
I was not an AIER employee nor present, even virtually, when the three
authors of the GBD met at AIER’s main campus in Great Barrington in
October 2020, so I cannot speak in detail about what transpired. I was,
however, floored by the over-the-top reaction from some quarters because
all the GBD urged was that policymakers should respond to Covid-19 the
same way that they had responded to all previous epidemics, by
protecting the most vulnerable as much as possible, not by locking down
the healthy, particularly those who had already acquired natural
immunities.
The three eminent public health scholars who authored the GBD,
however, came under intense personal attack from those committed to
continuing to try the already obviously failed
policy of “locking down,” i.e., of imposing top-down government
economic planning, aka socialism, in the name of public health. Except
in a few places like Florida, the lockdowners won by controlling mass
media messaging, feckless politicians, and, ultimately, the power of the
purse.
Key lockdown proponents, however, knew that their policy position was
irrational and hence untenable in the long run. In their eyes, the GBD
authors were guilty of a cardinal sin, exposing the fact that the policy
response to the pandemic was much more novel than the SARS-CoV-2 virus
itself, and hence they had to be punished lest their tried-and-true
policy of focused protection gain traction. The punishment came in the
form of a smear campaign, a series of ad hominem attacks against the GBD authors, and dismisinfoganda, including denying the existence of herd immunity(!!), that has continued to this day.
To combat overwhelming evidence that lockdowns saved no more lives
than the focused-protection policies advocated by the authors of the GBD
would have and that the costs of lockdowns were ginormous, orders of
magnitude more than focused-protection (AIER recently updated its report
on the business, economic, psychological, and social costs of lockdowns
here.), pro-lockdowners spun an obviously false conspiracy theory implicating one of the GBD authors in delaying Britain’s fall lockdown.
Phil Magness and I have sensed something terribly amiss in Britain ever since the John Snow Memorandum appeared soon after the GBD began to attract considerable international attention. Little did we know, though, that Dominic Cummings, chief advisor to British PM Boris Johnson, and Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of the British healthcare research nonprofit foundation the Wellcome Trust and (for now) member
of SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies), were so deeply
involved in the attacks against AIER and the GBD authors. In his recent
book Spike, however, Farrar noted that Cummings “wanted
to run an aggressive press campaign against those behind the Great
Barrington Declaration and others opposed to blanket Covid-19
restriction.”
Cummings is now on the outs with PM Johnson, but MP Neil O’Brien
may take his place in the inner sanctum. O’Brien was one of many Brit
policymakers duped by the Cummings campaign, to the point that he helped
to found Anti-Virus: The COVID-19 FAQ,
a radical pro-lockdown propaganda site that is some combination of daft
and inept. It admits, for example, that most PCR tests in Britain were
run at 40 or more cycles but “counters” by noting that PCR tests run at
or under 27 cycles were fairly accurate when compared to a culture test,
i.e., actually growing the “novel” coronavirus in a petri dish after
digging around some poor chap’s nose. Fine and dandy but irrelevant to
the actual situation! Other logical errors abound to the point that the
site has to be seen to be (dis)believed.
While we fervently wish that policymakers would expend their limited
time, money, and brainpower trying to help people by means of rational,
empirically-based policies instead of attacking public-spirited research
institutes and independent scientists with weak accusations, tortured
logic, and taxpayer money, the British and Chinese attacks at least make
AIER stronger by allowing us to make our case with donors (none of which include Koch-related institutions, some of which, incidentally, supported lockdowns).
Robert E. Wright is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.
He is the (co)author or (co)editor of over two dozen major books, book series, and edited collections, including AIER’s The Best of Thomas Paine (2021) and Financial Exclusion (2019). He has also (co)authored numerous articles for important journals, including the American Economic Review, Business History Review, Independent Review, Journal of Private Enterprise, Review of Finance, and Southern Economic Review.
Robert has taught business, economics, and policy courses at
Augustana University, NYU’s Stern School of Business, Temple University,
the University of Virginia, and elsewhere since taking his Ph.D. in
History from SUNY Buffalo in 1997.
n my previous column
I promised that today’s column would continue a discussion of vaccine
passports. Alas, I’m breaking that promise in order to promote a
different cause, one whose urgency was raised, at least from my vantage
point, in the past week. The cause is the fight against ad hominem
argumentation, and specifically, the use of such argumentation to
disparage AIER generally and, specifically, the Great Barrington
Declaration.
Ad Hominem
Loosely, the Latin phrase ad hominem translates as “to the man.” And according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective “ad hominem” – as in “That’s an ad hominem argument” – is an argument or reaction “directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining.”
Every semester near the start of my Principles of Microeconomics
course I identify six logical fallacies that occur with great frequency
in discussions of economics and economic policy. The ad hominem fallacy is among these six. The other five are:
[1] the post hoc, ergo propter hoc
fallacy;
[2] the naturalistic fallacy;
[3] what Matt Ridley calls the
“reverse naturalistic fallacy;”
[4] the fallacy of confusing the mean or
median of a group with any individual in the group; and
[5] the fallacy
of composition.)
I perform this exercise in order to warn students both
to avoid committing these fallacies themselves, and to avoid being
misled by these fallacies when these are committed by others.
While always widely used, ad hominem argumentation has seemingly become not only acceptable, but de rigueur, in arguments used by pro-lockdowners and anti-anti-lockdowners.
Not surprisingly, although no less unfortunately, AIER has been bombarded of late by ad hominem
attacks. I say “not surprisingly” because no organization has been as
visibly out in front as has AIER in challenging lockdowns in particular,
and the hysteria over Covid-19 more generally. Politicians, government
officials, and pundits who are committed to lockdowns and to opposing us
anti-lockdowners are angry at AIER’s unrelenting exposure of the
countless exaggerations, half-truths, and outright lies about lockdowns,
mask mandates, school closures, and Covid’s dangers.
AIER arranged for the October 2020 meeting that led to this
document’s drafting, and the Declaration is hosted on a website
maintained by AIER. It’s important to note, however, that no AIER
personnel – no board member, columnist, intern, accountant,
receptionist, or groundskeeper – played any role in writing this
document. The Declaration is co-written by Prof. Jay Bhattacharya of the
Stanford medical school, Prof. Sunetra Gupta, a theoretical
epidemiologist at Oxford University, and Prof. Martin Kulldorff of the
Harvard medical school.
Because this clear and concise anti-lockdown Declaration is not only
infused with much good sense, but also proposes, as a response to
SARS-CoV-2, what was regarded as mainstream public-health practice until
early 2020 – and even well-regarded by SAGE as recently as May of last year
– pro-lockdowners and anti-anti-lockdowners cannot easily attack the
Declaration’s substance. And so pro-lockdowers and anti-anti-lockdowners
resort to ad hominem argumentation.
Some of these logically fallacious arguments are attempts to
discredit the Declaration by pointing to mistaken predictions made by
its authors. Some other of these logically fallacious arguments are
attempts to discredit the Declaration by smearing AIER. Let’s consider
each of these attempts.
Science Is a Human Enterprise
Science is carried out by non-omniscient human beings who seek
greater knowledge and understanding through trial-and-error processes
unobstructed by dogma. Hypotheses are offered and then tested as best as
is humanly possible with logic, against the data, and against competing
hypotheses. Less-successful hypotheses are replaced by more-successful
ones. Thus does science advance.
The results are never perfect. Error is inseparable from trial and
error. A scientist who makes a faulty prediction no more thereby becomes
an unreliable scientist than does a baseball pitcher become an
unreliable pitcher merely by walking a batter or by giving up a grand
slam. Just as what matters for assessing the quality of a baseball
pitcher is his performance over many innings on the mound, what matters
for assessing someone’s quality as a scientist is that person’s
performance over many years in the lab, at the observatory, or at
wherever a particular scientist does his or her work.
Obviously, a scientist with a record of making an unusually large
number of poor predictions rightly loses credibility, especially
relative to scientists with better track records. And because time and
effort are scarce, it’s legitimate to screen out of consideration claims
made by scientists with poor reputations. Such a screening process is
not ad hominem; it’s a useful rule of thumb.
What’s not legitimate is to attempt to discredit an esteemed
scientist on the basis of one or a handful of poor predictions. Even
less legitimate is the attempt to discredit a substantive piece of work
by an esteemed scientist – a piece of work that can be judged on its own
merits – by pointing to one or a handful of that scientist’s poor
predictions.
Sadly, some of the ‘arguments’ against the Great Barrington
Declaration are of this sort. Each of its co-authors is an esteemed
scientist, and none of these scientists has the reputation of being an
ideologue. Yet some opponents of the Declaration nevertheless say, in
effect, “Look! This GBD co-author made this mistaken prediction. Gotcha!
The Great Barrington Declaration therefore is faulty and should be
ignored.”
The irony in this sort of logically fallacious argumentation is that
those who engage in it put their own credibility as scientists in
jeopardy. Making predictions that turn out to be faulty is a legitimate
and unavoidable feature of the scientific process; ad hominem argumentation is not.
It’s notable that those who are quick to disparage the Great
Barrington Declaration by pointing to some faulty predictions made by
its co-authors do not hold pro-lockdown scientists to the same exacting
standards. Anthony Fauci in 1983, writing about AIDS, suggested (as quoted by Phil Magness)
“the possibility that routine close contact, as within a family
household, can spread the disease.” Is Fauci’s penning of this claim –
known now (but not then) to be a howler – sufficient to discredit him as
a scientist?
In various years in the early
2000s Ferguson predicted up to 136,000 deaths from mad cow disease, 200
million from bird flu and 65,000 from swine flu. The final death toll in
each case was in the hundreds.
What logic leads anyone to continue to give credence to Fauci and
Ferguson while simultaneously pointing to faulty predictions by, say,
Prof. Gupta as a legitimate reason for dismissing the substance of the
Great Barrington Declaration?
Guilt by Association
An even weaker argument against the Great Barrington Declaration is
the observation that some people associated with AIER say, write, or
tweet some things that other people find to be beyond the pale.
I don’t wish here to assess, and much less to defend, everything ever
said or written by everyone affiliated with AIER. Undoubtedly, were I
to survey it all I’d find much with which I disagree. But the same is
true for every organization under the moon and stars.
Of relevance here is the irrelevance to the merits of the Great
Barrington Declaration of what AIER associates Mr. X and Ms. Y said or
tweeted.
Had the Great Barrington Declaration been penned by individuals known
chiefly for their membership in the Libertarian Party, by Fox News
interns, or by Miss Grundy’s sixth graders as a class project,
dismissing it merely by pointing to the identities and affiliations of
its authors would be acceptable. But this Declaration is co-authored by
world-renowned scientists, each of whom is expert in the public-health
challenges presented by Covid-19. Furthermore, this Declaration has been
endorsed by a large number of other credible scientists. Under these
circumstances, ad hominem dismissals of the Declaration simply carry no credibility.
Substantively criticizing parts or the whole of the Great Barrington
Declaration is legitimate. Indeed, such criticism is welcome; it’s part
of the scientific process. But in far too many cases people dismiss the
Declaration with nothing more than ad hominem assertions and
attempts to establish guilt by association. The conclusion that I draw
from these sorts of dismissals is that those who offer them actually
have no substantive criticism of the Declaration. After all, because
substantive criticisms would carry more weight even with Miss Grundy’s
sixth graders, anyone with such criticisms to offer would present them
front and center rather than resort to ad hominem argumentation.
The greatest compliment paid to the Great Barrington Declaration,
therefore, is one wholly unintended: Many of its staunchest opponents
offer against it nothing beyond ad hominem attacks and accusations of guilt by association. This Declaration must indeed be powerful!
Donald J. Boudreaux is a senior fellow
with American Institute for Economic Research and with the F.A. Hayek
Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the
Mercatus Center at George Mason University; a Mercatus Center Board
Member; and a professor of economics and former economics-department
chair at George Mason University. He is the author of the books The Essential Hayek, Globalization, Hypocrites and Half-Wits, and his articles appear in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, US News & World Report as well as numerous scholarly journals. He writes a blog called Cafe Hayek and a regular column on economics for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Boudreaux earned a PhD in economics from Auburn University and a law degree from the University of Virginia.
Get notified of new articles from Donald J. Boudreaux and AIER.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, on the one-year anniversary of the lockdowns, invited back the scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration,
signed at the offices of the American Institute for Economic Research,
for a roundtable on the Coronavirus and the policy response. It is
exceptionally educational, and points to the reality that the
lockdowners have lost the debate for lacking any evidence that their
soul-crushing policies are good for public health. These heroic
scientists departed from the media/government narrative when it mattered
most. As a result, some states followed their point of view and their
views have shown to be correct during the worst policy year of our
lifetimes.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, on the one-year anniversary of the lockdowns, invited back the scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration,
signed at the offices of the American Institute for Economic Research,
for a roundtable on the Coronavirus and the policy response. It is
exceptionally educational, and points to the reality that the
lockdowners have lost the debate for lacking any evidence that their
soul-crushing policies are good for public health. These heroic
scientists departed from the media/government narrative when it mattered
most. As a result, some states followed their point of view and their
views have shown to be correct during the worst policy year of our
lifetimes.
The entire event was recorded. Complete transcript below.
Gov. DeSantis:
Jay Bhattacharya is Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and
research associate at the National Bureau Of Economic Research. And then
we have Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician, epidemiologist and
professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. We had both Martin and
Jay over the summer, at the end of the summer, talking about kind of the
state of play with the COVID-19 pandemic, evaluating some of the policy
choices that had been made in different parts of the United States, as
well as around the world, and covered a lot of good ground. Now we’re
six, seven, eight months down the road from that and I thought it would
make sense to bring them back as well as to bring Professor Gupta and
Scott Atlas.
Gov. DeSantis:
So first, we asked both Jay and Martin, did our lockdowns effective?
Do you recommend that any state or country do lockdowns going forward?
And I think both of you advise strongly against it. So here we are, six,
seven, eight months down the road. Martin, you stand by what you said
and have you been proven to be correct?
Dr. Martin Kulldorff:
I do stand by it. I think it’s obvious by now that these lockdowns
and contact tracing and masks, they were not able to prevent a
resurgence of the disease during the winter. And the problem is that the
belief that the pandemic will be suppressed through these lockdowns
meant that in a lot of places in the world, people did not use focused
protections of the old. They thought that the lockdowns would protect
the old, but they didn’t. So they didn’t put in the standard public
health message to actually properly protect the older high-risk people.
And I think that’s very tragic and it has led to many unnecessary death
among our older citizens.
Gov. DeSantis:
Jay, do you stand by what you said and how do you think the last six, seven, eight months have had born out?
Dr. Battacharya:
I think the lockdowns are the single biggest public health mistake in
history. I think the lockdowns have, as Martin said, have failed to
protect the vulnerable. The lockdowns have led to many, many, many
unnecessary deaths, both directly as a result of the lockdowns, And also
indirectly through this misplaced faith in the ability of the lockdowns
to protect the vulnerable. We should instead have adopted a policy, and
most places, should have adopted a policy that got rid of lockdowns and
instead focused on people we knew to be truly vulnerable to disease,
older populations, people with certain chronic diseases, adopted
policies, actually much more similar to what Florida has done, rather
than the state where I live, California, which has relied on lockdowns
to a disastrous effect.
Gov. DeSantis:
Professor Gupta, across the pond, I know that they’ve instituted a
lot of lockdowns in Great Britain as well as throughout Europe. You’ve
been critical of that. Do you stand by your criticism? How’s it going in
Britain now? Are you still on lockdown? And what do you think the
ethicacy of those lockdowns have been in Britain?
Dr. Gupta:
We are still under lockdown, even though we’ve vaccinated the bulk of
our vulnerable population. So people are at the moment suffering all
the costs of lockdown without there being any obvious benefits, should
this have been the case in the first place that there were any benefits.
Myself and many others, including Carl Hennigan, have been warning
consistently that these policies are detrimental, that they have a very
high cost and that those costs should be visible and on the table before
any decision is taken. Focused protection of course offers a kind of
solution to the stark truth that we in the UK cannot afford lockdowns,
nor indeed as indeed is the case most of the world. And the other
reality is that an imperfect lockdown is actually closer to a let it rip
strategy than a focused protection strategy, which I believe is easier
to implement................To Read Much More.
This is a particularly long and insightful piece and worth the time. RK
Over 18,000 (and growing) medical public health scientists and medical practitioners have signed the Great Barrington Declaration,
pleads with the various governments around the world to end the
lockdowns and open the economy. As of right now, over 166,000 members of
the general public have also signed the petition.
Here are some key points:
Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. ...
Keeping
these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause
irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.
...
Fortunately,
our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability
to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old
and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less
dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.......To Read More.....
On October 4, 2020, this declaration was authored and signed in Great Barrington, United States, by:
Dr. Martin Kulldorff,
professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and
epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring of infectious
disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations.
Dr. Sunetra Gupta,
professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in
immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious
diseases.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya,
professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician,
epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert
focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.
The Great
Barrington Declaration – As infectious disease epidemiologists and
public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging
physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies,
and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.
Coming from
both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our
careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing
devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results
(to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening
cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and
deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in
years to come, with the working class and younger members of society
carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave
injustice.
Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is
available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged
disproportionately harmed.
Fortunately, our understanding of the
virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is
more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young.
Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms,
including influenza.
As immunity builds in the population, the
risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know
that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the
point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can
be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should
therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd
immunity.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks
and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at
minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity
to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those
who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Adopting
measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public
health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should
use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of
other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized.
Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials
delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members
outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of
measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be
implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public
health professionals.
Those who are not vulnerable should
immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene
measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be
practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and
universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular
activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults
should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other
businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities
should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they
wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the
vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.
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