Drs Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), Sunetra Gupta (Oxford) and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford)
From October 1-4 the American Institute for Economic Research hosted a meeting of top epidemiologists, economists, and journalists. Their purpose was discuss the global emergency and the devastating effects on both short term and long term public health created by the world wide management of COVID 19. Rather than the current unprecedented and hugely damaging use of state compulsion they recommend ‘Focused Protection’ – protecting the most vulnerable while allowing the rest of us to get on with our lives.
They have embodied their recommendations in what they are calling The Great Barrington Declaration – and it has already been signed by 1,913 medical and public health scientists, 2,159 medical practitioners and, to date, 34,139 members of the public – or, with my just-added signature, 34,150.
Below is what it says but you can also watch Drs Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), Sunetra Gupta (Oxford) and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) speaking about the declaration here.
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.
If you agree you can add your name here.
No Top 14 – or 15 – or 16?….
Dear Michelle,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr04gHbP5MQ&feature=youtu.be
Finally, excellent – signed.
Very sensible approach. Signed.
Thanks for the link, Christopher – I had seen Dr. Fuellmich’s video a couple of days ago. It seems that opposition to the current way of doing things is gathering pace – possibly not before time….
I don’t agree. There’s still no evidence of long-term immunity anyway, and there are increasing cases of reinfections (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/06/flurry-of-coronavirus-reinfections-leaves-scientists-puzzled). This also seems to ignore long COVID, the implications of which are not yet known, and could leave us with a far greater health crisis in years to come. We need to know more before this sort of idea is considered, in my view.
I don’t think that anyone, including those espousing this idea, thinks that it is risk free, Alex. It is more a question of balancing the risk and balancing the collateral damage. This, even just in health terms, is so horrendous that taking some reasonable degree of risk to alleviate it seems to me to be the less damaging way forward.
Everything is a risk, I understand that. But the plan is built on a theory that we can reach herd immunity without a vaccine. We do not know this to be true.
Thanks for this Michelle, so sensible,
We don’t know that anything is true…. That is the issue. And we certainly don’t know that we are ever going to get a vaccine and even if we do, that it will be any use. So it is a question of choosing the least risky, least apparently bad option.
To me the Barrington proposal seems to threaten a lower level of population wide damage than our current course of action. However, I think that it is very unlikely to be adopted in the near future at least just because government has now invested too much in the lockdown/compulsion approach to be able to row back.
Well it’s getting a lot of attention, I’ll give it that … https://news.sky.com/story/coronvairus-dr-johnny-bananas-and-dr-person-fakename-among-medical-signatories-on-herd-immunity-open-letter-12099947
Whoops – that is a bit unfortunate – but probably inevitable. As they say they do not the the resources to check every signatory. (I will not comment on signatures by homeopaths that I would regard as being more than legitimate but I know you wouldn’t.) There was always going to be a major push back from those who believe the lockdown is the only answer.
The push back is from mainstream scientists, none of whom from what I’ve seen consider lockdown the only answer. The organisation behind this declaration is a right-wing US group with a goal of promoting ‘pure freedom’. Covid is the perfect vehicle for them to do so, and they’re undermining science in the process. We surely can’t expect healthy young people to get themselves infected to promote a herd immunity we don’t know can even be achieved, doubly so when we don’t know the long-term effects of this disease, including on the asymptomatic.
Yes, but main stream scientist can also get stuck in a thought pathway. I accept that the orgnisation which presumably funded this is a right wing free market etc group – but that does not invalidate what the speakers are saying.
The issue with the lockdown approach is that it has no future. OK, so you lockdown and if no one talks to anyone then the virus stops spreading. But as soon as you lift the lockdown it just picks up where it left off – exactly as it has done recently. We have to find some way of living with it which does not depend on lock down and/or the slender hope of a vaccine which may never happen, may never work and will never be available in sufficient quantities to vaccinate whole populations.
An approach such as that advocated in the Barrington document which targets restrictions according to risk thus at least minimising the long term health (physical and psychological) and economic effects of continuing on/off lockdowns seems to me to offer a better chance to coming to grips with the problem.
See this depressing article in the Spectator about the suppression of Information of the Declaration – this is certainly not the first time I have read of Google’s censorship, pushing items way way down the search pages.
Depressing indeed – thank you for pointing it out.