Great Barrington Declaration

The idea to issue a declaration came from a conference run by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER). Gupta, one of the authors, said that given journals’ reluctance to publish on herd immunity and that the authors had been "repeatedly dismissed as fringe or pseudoscience," an open letter was chosen as the publication route out of necessity. The declaration says that lockdowns have adverse effects on physical and mental health, for example, because people postpone preventive healthcare. The authors propose reducing these harms by ending mandatory restrictions on most activities for most people. Without these restrictions, more people will develop COVID-19. They believe that these infections will produce herd immunity (the idea that when enough people become immune, then the virus will stop circulating widely), which will eventually make it less likely that high-risk people will be exposed to the virus. 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 2020, many of these things had already happened in some parts of the world, The declaration does not provide practical details about who should be protected or how they can be protected. For instance, it does not mention testing any people outside of nursing homes, contact tracing, wearing masks, or social distancing. 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. The declaration does not provide any references to published data that support the declaration's strategy. == Authors ==

. (L–R) Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, Jay Bhattacharya Sunetra Gupta is a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Oxford University Department of Zoology. Gupta has been a critic of early COVID-19 lockdown strategy, arguing that the cost is too high for the poorest in society, and expressing concern about the risk of widespread starvation in many countries because of lockdown-related disruptions in food supply chains. and in September a preprint study which argued herd immunity thresholds might be lower than expected due to pre-existing immunity in the population. Rupert Beale of the Francis Crick Institute described the March preprint as "ridiculous" and "not even passed by peer review". Gupta 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 lockdown method of the British government response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 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 that the situation would only be temporary. 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 have already been infected with COVID-19. The study and conduct of the research drew wide criticism for statistical and methodological errors and apparent lack of disclosure of conflicts. The study was later revealed to have received undisclosed funding from JetBlue's founder David Neeleman, according to an anonymous whistle blower. Bhattacharya said that he received racist attacks and death threats during the pandemic, and he also claimed that "Big tech outlets like Facebook and Google" suppressed "our ideas, falsely deeming them 'misinformation'". He also said that "I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to 'let the virus rip', when I had proposed nothing of the sort." Bhattacharya argued that the declaration did not take "a contrarian position, but represents the standard way of dealing with respiratory virus pandemics that the world has followed for a century until 2020." Martin Kulldorff was at the time a professor of medicine and a biostatistician at Harvard University. He had defended Sweden's response to the pandemic and, along with Bhattacharya, wrote a Wall Street Journal editorial arguing against testing the young and healthy for SARS-CoV-2. Kulldorff had previously claimed 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." Since 2021, Bhattacharya, Kulldorff and Gupta have worked with Brownstone Institute, a think tank that has opposed COVID-19 masking and vaccine mandates. The institute was started in 2021 by Jeffrey Tucker, the AIER editorial director who helped organize the Great Barrington Declaration. It has described itself as the declaration's "spiritual child". Bhattacharya and Kulldorff were named senior scholars there. Gupta has been an author. == Sponsor ==

The declaration was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free-market think tank based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which has a history of promoting climate change denial, and the benefits of sweatshops. Byline Times journalist Nafeez Ahmed has described the AIER as an "institution embedded in a Koch-funded network that denies climate science while investing in polluting fossil fuel industries". == Signatories ==

While the authors' website claims that over 14,000 scientists, 40,000 medical practitioners, and more than 800,000 members of the public signed the declaration, this list—which anyone could sign online and which required merely clicking a checkbox to claim the status of "scientist"—contains some evidently-fake names, including: "Mr Banana Rama", "Harold Shipman", and "Prof Cominic Dummings". 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". An article in The Independent reported that the false signatures put claims about the breadth of support in doubt. Bhattacharya responded by saying that the authors "did not have the resources to audit each signature," and that people had "abused our trust" by adding fake names. == Reception ==

Critical commentaries , Patrick Vallance told the House of Commons's Science and Technology Select Committee on 3 November that the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, having examined the declaration's proposal, had found "fatal flaws in the argument". 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". On 7 October 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." On 15 October, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Leader of the House of Commons, told parliament: "The Government are sceptical about the Barrington declaration." He explained that "Focused Protection" was operationally impractical and would "inevitably" cause the deaths of "a very large number of people". Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and lead member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, called the declaration "ridiculous", "total nonsense" and "very dangerous", saying that it would lead to a large number of avoidable deaths. Fauci said that 30 percent of the population had underlying health conditions that made them vulnerable to the virus and that "older adults, even those who are otherwise healthy, are far more likely than young adults to become seriously ill if they get COVID-19." 14 other American public-health groups, among them the Trust for America's Health and the American Public Health Association, published an open letter in which they warned that following the recommendations of the Great Barrington Declaration would "haphazardly and unnecessarily sacrifice lives", adding that "the declaration is not a strategy, it is a political statement. It ignores sound public health expertise. It preys on a frustrated populace. Instead of selling false hope that will predictably backfire, we must focus on how to manage this pandemic in a safe, responsible, and equitable way." Europe's largest association of virologists, the Gesellschaft für Virologie, released a statement co-authored by Christian Drosten saying the declaration's proposals were liable to result in "a humanitarian and economic catastrophe". The then-U.S. National Institutes of Health director, Francis Collins, told The Washington Post that the proposed strategy was "a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment." William Haseltine, a former Harvard Medical School professor and founder of Harvard's cancer and HIV/AIDS research departments, told CNN, "Herd immunity is another word for mass murder. If you allow this virus to spread … we are looking at 2 to 6 million Americans dead. Not just this year, but every year." 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". 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." 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." However, Nabarro rejected Trump's interpretation of his comments, saying that the lockdowns in the spring had been necessary as emergency measures, to buy time, and emphasized the need to find a "middle way", with "masks, social distancing, fewer crowds, testing and tracing" the right way forward. 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. Of the declarations' signatories he said: "There's a lot of other people who have also signed it and guess what, it's the usual suspects … It's Karol Sikora who knows nothing about this whatsoever but who is endlessly self-promoting, and you've got Michael Levitt who's got a bad case of Nobel Prize disease." 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. 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." He said: "Ethically, history has taught us that the notion of segregating society, even perhaps with good initial intentions, usually ends in suffering." Simon Clarke, associate professor in cellular microbiology at 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." John M. Barry, a professor at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and author of a book on the 1918 flu pandemic, wrote in The New York Times that the Great Barrington Declaration sounds attractive until one examines "three enormously important omissions". Firstly, it says nothing about harm suffered by people in low-risk groups, even though a significant number of patients who recover from COVID-19, including people who experience no symptoms, have been shown to have heart and lung damage. 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 engages in climate change denial. , England's Chief Medical Officer, said the scientists behind the Declaration were "just wrong". In November 2023 during the UK COVID-19 Inquiry, England's chief medical officer Chris Whitty gave evidence that government ministers had been 'bamboozled' by talk of herd immunity in the early stages of the pandemic, and that he thought the scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration "were just wrong, straightforwardly", adding that the Declaration was "flawed at multiple levels". Signatories' statements Citing the principle first do no harm, Matt Strauss, a physician and assistant professor at Queen's School of Medicine, subsequently wrote that mandatory government lockdowns "amount to a medical recommendation of no proven benefit, of extraordinary potential harm, that do not take personal values and individual consent into account" and that "if lockdowns were a prescription drug for Covid treatment, the FDA would never have approved it". 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 COVID-19, 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 "We need to protect the vulnerable, but right now in Quebec they're not protected". Co-signatory Ellen Townsend, 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". Mike Hulme, professor of human geology at the University of Cambridge said he had signed because he had "been frustrated that there hasn't been a sufficiently open public debate in the UK". Anthony Brooks, professor of genetics at the University of Leicester, criticized the British Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance, alleging that "Being a senior vice president at a drug company doesn't give you the same background that others have. They're seeing things in a non-sophisticated way." 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. Bhattacharya denied that a herd immunity strategy was recommended by the declaration, saying that "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". Conservative MP for New Forest West, Desmond Swayne asked the Leader of the House of Commons if a debate could be held on what he called "censorship" and "the sinister disappearance of the link from Google to the Great Barrington declaration". Conservative journalist Toby Young wrote an opinion piece in The Spectator supporting the declaration and querying the credentials of its critics, claiming they were "censors" and "smear merchants" while claiming the declaration's authors were not "outliers or cranks" but there had been a "well-orchestrated attempt to suppress and discredit it". On 1 November, eurosceptic former members of the European Parliament, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, announced in The Telegraph that an application has been made to the Electoral Commission for their Brexit Party to be renamed Reform UK; after identifying the British government response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a more pressing issue than Brexit, the party is to advocate Focused Protection in accordance with the Great Barrington Declaration. On 6 October, the declaration was endorsed by The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, who called it "the best advice for how we should cope with Covid." == Counter memorandum ==

The John Snow Memorandum, the text of which was published simultaneously in The Lancet and dedicated site www.johnsnowmemo.com, and built on a previous The Lancet correspondence piece, is a response by 80 researchers denouncing the Great Barrington Declaration and its herd immunity approach. Taking its name from John Snow, the epidemiologist who worked on the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak, and included researchers and clinicians such as Marc Lipsitch, William Hanage, Emma Hodcroft, Martin McKee, Dominic Pimenta, Viola Priesemann, Gavin Yamey, and Rochelle Walensky. Other signatories have included Reinhard Busse, The BMJ published responses to his paper, including a comment by Gavin Yamey, David Gorski, and Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz which argued that Ioannidis's paper featured "factual errors, statistical shortcomings, failure to protect the named research subjects from harm, and potentially undeclared conflicts of interest that entirely undermine the analysis presented." ==See also ==