Covid-19 FAQ vs GB Declaration (1): Introduction

Covid-19 FAQ on the Great Barrington Declaration 
I: Introduction

by George J. Dance

from "A Defence of the Great Barrington Declaration from Its Powerful Critics", The Daily Sceptic, 22 March 2021.

The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD),(1) under which thousands of scientists and medical practitioners have called for a end to lockdown policies, was drawn up last October 1st-4th, was announced on October 5th, and was already being denounced by October 6th. Over the next month, the GBD and its message were virtually buried beneath an “avalanche of scathing criticism condemning it as ‘very dangerous, unscientific, unethical, total nonsense, dangerously flawed, conspiratorial and grotesque’. Among the critics were prominent role-players such as World Health Organization director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, British chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance, and US infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci”.(2) Defenders of the lockdown consensus even released a counter-manifesto, the John Snow Memorandum,(3) (ironically named for epidemiology’s most famous dissenter from a scientific consensus).

At the time I read everything I could on the topic and made copious notes, hoping to write my own perspective on the GBD. Long before I was in a position to do that, though, the debate had moved on, and I never had an opportunity to revisit the subject.

Fortunately, there is a new FAQ in town: Anti-Virus: The COVID-19 FAQ.(4) This new FAQ may not be the best place to go for scientific advice about the disease; the ‘doctors’ behind it seem to mainly have doctorates in economics and psychology (though I have read that there is an anonymous scientist involved), and some of their claims, such as “Covid still has a high fatality rate among younger people”, seem supported more by semantics than by science. (“Younger” in context turns out to be “younger than 65”).(5) But at least the FAQ has revived the Declaration and assembled a ‘best of’ the criticisms levelled against it, making it worthwhile to revisit the debate.

Before getting to that, it is helpful to look at background context. A major player in the Anti-virus FAQ is a Member of the UK Parliament, Neil O’Brien, introduced (by The Times) in November as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “new policy guru”.(6) Johnson has faced a backbench rebellion from a group of lockdown sceptics within his Conservative Party, the Covid Recovery Group (CRG); concerns have been expressed that the CRG could defeat the Government in Parliament, should the opposition Labour party vote with them (unlikely as that seems, with Labour leader Keir Starmer reading the same polls as Johnson).(7) At least one cabinet minister has privately lashed out at both the CRG and the GBD.(7) Johnson’s new policy guru has now taken the fight against lockdown sceptics and scepticism to the public, apparently with Government backing;(8) and the COVID-19 FAQ seems an integral part of his messaging.

Strangely, though, there is little talk of lockdowns or lockdown sceptics on the FAQ at all. Its first paragraph briefly mentions those who say “that governments shouldn’t try to contain the virus with lockdowns”, but only to lump them in with those who believe that “Covid isn’t particularly dangerous”, rebrand the lot as “Covid Sceptics,”. and then attribute a number of absurd beliefs to them, including but not limited to:

• “the number of infections is much lower than it really has been”
• “health systems were under less strain than they really were”
• “the fatality rate and number of deaths were lower than they have been in reality”.(4)

That stated, the FAQsters turn their full attention to the alleged Covid Sceptics and their alleged claims. The underlying strategy seems to be not to defend lockdowns directly, but to avoid mentioning or discussing them: to keep readers from thinking about them as much as possible, changing the subject to “Covid Sceptics” and their “absurd claims”. It also gives lockdown zealots lots of bullet points to easily repeat and cite, while making the lockdown sceptics spend their time and energy rebutting same, thus both (1) discrediting opposition to lockdowns and (2) suppressing any real discussion of them.

The FAQ's page on the GBD follows the same script. Titled “The Great Barrington Declaration gives a good alternative to lockdown”, that page begins by quoting the position it is opposing (from the GBD): 

Lockdowns are a very bad idea – they cause economic havoc, stop people getting medical attention for non-COVID problems, and increase loneliness, isolation, and mental health problems. Instead, we should be shielding the vulnerable, and allowing younger, healthier people to live their lives, building natural herd immunity when they catch the virus.(9)

Then it drops the subject of lockdowns, and never gets back to it. 

Instead, the FAQsters try to rebut the GBD claim with seven counter-claims of their own, meant to add up to a comprehensive refutation. It is best to take those in turn.

1. Great Barrington Declaration.
2. Gerritt Olivier, “Terrifying citizens with overwhelming statistics is no help during a pandemic”, Business Day, February 20th, 2021.
3. Nisreen A. Alwan et al., “Scientific consensus on the COVID-19 pandemic: we need to act now” The Lancet, October 15th, 2020.
4. “What is Anti-Virus”, Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ.
5. “Claim: Covid is only a problem for the elderly and vulnerable,” Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ.
6. Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson, “PM’s new policy guru takes Trump to task”, The Times, November 21st, 2020.
7. Jessica Elgot, Heather Stewart and Peter Walker, “Tory rebels fire warning shot as 42 MPs vote against stricter Covid measures”, The Guardian, October 13th, 2020.
8. Sam Bright, “CONSERVATIVES DIVIDED: Scourge of Lockdown Sceptics Neil O’Brien MP Receives Government Backing”, Byline Times, January 27th, 2021.
9. All quotations in italics are from: “Claim: The Great Barrington Declaration gives a good alternative to lockdown”, Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ.
10. Gavin Yamey, “This thread is brilliant”, Twitter, March 8th, 2021.
11. Dominic Lawson, “The second wave of Covid has drowned the sceptics’ delusions”, The Times, January 17th, 2021. 
12. Dominic Lawson, “This vaccine needles the lockdown sceptics”, The Times, December 6th, 2020.

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Covid-19 FAQ vs GBD (2): Vaccines & antivaxxers

Covid-19 FAQ on the Great Barrington Declaration 
II: Vaccines and anti-vaxxers

by George J. Dance

from "A Defence of the Great Barrington Declaration from Its Powerful Critics", The Daily Sceptic, 22 March 2021. 

 1) We have vaccines now. The Great Barrington Declaration was misconceived right from the beginning, for reasons we’ll discuss below. But now that we have very effective vaccines, the case for “natural herd immunity” – that is, letting the virus burn through certain parts of the population – is weaker than ever. There is now an end in sight, and a great many people now have the possibility to *never get the virus* in the first place.(9)

I am glad the FAQsters have an "end in sight", but it would be more helpful to know what particular end they are visualising. Is it when the most at-risk are vaccinated? When enough are vaccinated to reach the herd immunity threshold (the point at which enough people are immune that a virus no longer spreads epidemically)? When the virus is eliminated in one's country? When it is eradicated world-wide? Many countries are nowhere near even that first “end”, while achieving the last could take decades. Whatever the end, it will take some time before it arrives, and until then either option – let people live their lives, or keep them locked down – is still very much a live one.

At first glance, it seems to me that the coming of safe and effective vaccines not only weakens, but demolishes, the best argument for lockdowns: that they are the only way to stop the disease from spreading. It does not weaken the GBD goal of reaching “herd immunity” (ie, reaching the herd immunity threshold [or HIT]) – safe and effective vaccines make it possible to hit the HIT quicker, with a much reduced danger of death, than not having them. Nor do they weaken the GBD position that people be allowed to live their own lives now: The more people vaccinated, the more attractive that alternative becomes to more of them. 

So the FAQsters seem to be arguing only against the word “natural”, which sounds like very much like a strawman argument (the major premise of which is that the GBD authors and signatories oppose vaccination).

It is common to find posts on social media calling the GBD authors anti-vaxxers, some by those who signed the John Snow Memorandum. (At least one Snowjobber makes a regular hobby of it.)(10) And such talk  has also seeped into the professional media. Take for instance Dominic Lawson of The Times, the FAQsters' comrade in the war on lockdown sceptics, even employing the same "Covid sceptic" terminology (“I am reminded of [an old joke] by the COVID-19 sceptics (or lockdown sceptics, as some call themselves).”)(11) Here is Lawson pontificating that, and why, lockdown sceptics oppose vaccination: 

For those who have opposed the Government’s overall strategy of (intermittently) strict enforcement of social distancing until the arrival of a vaccine, the good news has confounded their predictions and analysis – and many of the most prominent among them have reacted with churlishness, even outright hostility. They are the same people who eulogised what they perceive to be Sweden’s approach: to go for “herd immunity” via naturally acquired infections (whatever the cost in lives) rather than clamp down with legislative force… But rather than admit that [Oxford researcher Sarah] Gilbert (and [Health Secretary Matt] Hancock) had proved their no-alternative-to-herd-immunity-through-naturally-acquired-infection strategy wrong, prominent “lockdown sceptics” have instead cast doubt on the vaccine approved by the MHRA.(12)

It seems necessary, then, to spell out and deal with that "no-alternative-to-herd-immunity-through-naturally-acquired-infection strategy" strawman.

The GBD contains just one sentence about vaccines. "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." (1) That arguably downplays the importance of vaccines, but understandably so, since there were none at the time it was written. However, to argue that it or its authors oppose vaccination is to twist it out of all recognition.    

Since vaccines have become available, the GBD authors have increasingly emphasized their role. In this quote from an early December interview, for instance, one can question Dr. Bhattacharya’s timeline, but not his belief in vaccination: "I think if we use the vaccine correctly we can get back to normal within two months. Let’s say, if we have 50 million people vaccinated, who are at the highest risk, at that point we can open society up."(13)

[Having safe and effective vaccines does not weaken, but strengthens, both the chances of reaching "herd immunity," and the case for letting people live their normal lives until we reach it. It does weaken the case for leaving them all locked up in the interim. And simply calling lockdown sceptics antivaxxers does nothing to help that case.] 

9. All quotations in italics are from: “Claim: The Great Barrington Declaration gives a good alternative to lockdown”, Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ.

10. Gavin Yamey, “This thread is brilliant”, Twitter, March 8th, 2021.

11. Dominic Lawson, “The second wave of Covid has drowned the sceptics’ delusions”, The Times, January 17th, 2021. 

12. Dominic Lawson, “This vaccine needles the lockdown sceptics”, The Times, December 6th, 2020.

13. Matthew Impelli, “Authors of Anti-Lockdown Great Barrington Declaration Suggest COVID Could Be Over in 2 Months With Vaccine”, Newsweek, December 7th, 2020.

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Covid-19 FAQ vs GBD (3): Shielding vulnerable

Covid-19 FAQ on the Great Barrington Declaration 
III: Shielding the vulnerable

by George J. Dance

from "A Defence of the Great Barrington Declaration from Its Powerful Critics", The Daily Sceptic, 22 March 2021. 

2) Nobody really knows how to “shield” vulnerable people. It sounds very simple: keep the older and more vulnerable people safe, and let everyone else go about their business. But it’s really not that straightforward. Practically, *how* do you keep those vulnerable people safe?(9)

The first thing to occur to a GBD signatory like myself is: “Offer them a vaccine first.” As noted, that is what the GBD authors have been championing, and it has actually become Government policy in some places. Granted, though, that vaccines are not magic; they will not prevent 100% of all Covid-related diseases or deaths; and in some places and for some people for they will not be available for a while. So what else can be done?

Take, for instance, multi-generational households. A great many students and other adult children live with their parents (according to one report, this is around a third of all homes in the UK). In some communities, grandparents often live in the same home as grandchildren. Sharing a home with an infected person is one of the most common ways of catching the coronavirus – one study from South Korea found that home contacts of an infected person were more than six times more likely to have the disease than other contacts. So the question is: where are all the high-risk people supposed to go to “shield” while their younger family members go out and about, merrily catching the virus? The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration have never given anything approaching an adequate answer.

The best answer to that question is to note the questionable assumptions in it. One is that seniors in multi-generational households will have to be removed, perhaps by Government-enforced orders, to quarantine camps or hotels (when GBD in fact advocates no such thing). The other is that, in the absence of lockdowns, everyone would rush out to quickly and even "merrily" catch the virus (when it is actually to each person’s advantage to hang back and let others build herd immunity by catching it instead).

Stripping those assumptions out, though, the problem of multi-generational households remains; and one can compare alternative solutions. The lockdown one is simple: prevent Mom from going to work, and her daughter from going to school, and Granny will have nothing to worry about. Yet even a champion of lockdowns like New York governor Andrew Cuomo has questioned how well that worked out: “I don’t even know that that was the best public health policy. Young people then quarantined with older people, [it] was probably not the best public health strategy… The younger people could have been exposing the older people to an infection.”(14)

The GBD solution, on the other hand, would be to let these people “live their lives”, which includes managing their own risks. Some common sense suggestions are: the daughter and mother should limit close contact with Granny; they should all give each other maximum space; they should let plenty of fresh air into the house; they should take Vitamins C and D and zinc, and drink tea, to build up their natural immunity. They could all be home-tested or temperature-checked regularly; anyone who felt even mildly ill could wear a mask. Perhaps Mom and Granny could take Ivermectin. Granny could even get a vaccine. (Yes, we have those now.) None of the above requires Government supervision. Not only are most families in situations like these able to manage such risks – as Hayek pointed out, their knowledge of their own particular conditions, which the Government lacks, makes them able to better manage their risks than it would be able to. 

If the daughter does catch Covid, she may have to leave home for a couple of weeks, going perhaps to a relative, perhaps to a hospital. After two weeks, though, when she is no longer infectious, she can not only return home but resume a closer relationship with Mom and Granny. Because she now has little to no chance of catching Covid, she has next to no chance of passing it on. By gaining immunity, she is no longer a threat to them but rather a shield; she can be an intermediary contact between Mom, Granny, and others who come to the door. The buildup of natural immunity is not just a means to the goal of "herd immunity," but something that is in itself beneficial. 

I realize that two of my own underlying premises – that individuals knowing their own local conditions may manage their own risks better than politicians writing general rules for everyone; and that infections that lead to full recovery and immunity are good things, not bad, because they can protect the more at-risk from infections – may be controversial with some. But I will skip arguing for them here, as this section is already too long.

3) The number of people isolating would be enormous. There were 14,843,119 people in the UK who lived in a household with someone aged 65+ in 2019, and 2,240,850 patients on the Shielded List – though some of these are over 65, so there’s some overlap.

I appreciate that the FAQsters try to give a precise number, rather than use the “defining who is vulnerable is complex” dodge the John Snow Memorandum resorted to.(3) I am also glad to see their scare quotes disappear from the word “Shielded”. I do think the estimated number is too high, not just because of “some overlap”, but also because (as I hope I explained well enough in the previous section) it does not seem necessary that everyone in a multi-generational household continue to be “isolated” or locked down. Certainly the GBD does not advocate a lockdown for all of them, or even a limited lockdown for seniors only. (On the contrary, it emphasises that those “who are more at risk may participate [in social life] if they wish”.(1)

That would have meant at least 15 million people being required to self-isolate, requiring food and medical attention at home while the virus was spreading unimpeded in the outside world. It’s unclear how we would have provided food and medical supplies to such a large number of people while the rest of the population was living through the worst pandemic in a century, with all the disruption and work absences that would entail.

What a nightmare! 15 million people placed under a Melbourne-style lockdown for months on end, unable to venture out even to buy food – many not even in their own homes. (Remember “where are all the high-risk people supposed to go”?). Fortunately, that is not what the GBD is advocating. To repeat; it does not call for replacing a lockdown of the non-essential with a lockdown of the vulnerable. It does not advocate locking anyone down.

Some or many seniors (like myself) will voluntarily isolate,. [Voluntary isolation is quite different psychologically from being locked down. For one thing, a person does not experience giving up control; for another, the person adopts rules that suit him and make it easier for him to obey them) In practical details, though, I expect it would be]* little different from life under lockdown here in Ontario – not coincidentally, during the “worst pandemic in a century”. So let me mention how I made it through that:

The Ontario Government, in its wisdom, has closed most of the stores in my neighbourhood, but left one grocery store and one big-box retailer. I was allowed to walk to those, but did not have to do even that: My wife could order food and medicine on an app, and the same day someone will drop the goods at my apartment door, knock, and leave them. Believe it or not, that is not yet another Government app, but that has been offered by a private company since our very first lockdown. The Government’s role has been limited to making sure my pension gets into my bank account, something it was already doing, so tackling the alleged logistical nightmare has actually cost it nothing.

The experience has reinforced my beliefs that: first, individuals with knowledge of their local conditions can sometimes do a better job of managing their risks than Government officials with out such knowledge; second, that a market economy, with free entry to local entrepreneurs (with their own knowledge of those local conditions, can help me and others manage our risks than better than whatever Government programs the FAQsters could devise. A free market, and a vital civil society, can accomplish many things more efficiently than a Government, and here is another example. 

It follows that the less of the market and society a Government disrupts [that is, the less their response resemles a lockdown]*, the more efficiently the nation will be able to deal with both routine programs and emergencies.

* [Written Oct. 7, 2020]

1. Great Barrington Declaration.

3. Nisreen A. Alwan et al., “Scientific consensus on the COVID-19 pandemic: we need to act now” The Lancet, October 15th, 2020.

14. Bernadette Hogan and Aaron Feis, “Cuomo wonders if coronavirus quarantine may have backfired in some cases”, New York Post, March 26th, 2020.

Read full article here

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Covid-19 FAQ vs GBD (4): How many would die?

Anti-virus: The Covid-19 FAQ on the Great Barrington Declaration 
IV: How many would die? 

by George J. Dance

from "A Defence of the Great Barrington Declaration from Its Powerful Critics", The Daily Sceptic, 22 March 2021.  

 4) “Focused protection” would still mean a very large number of deaths among the wider population. Applying a rough age-based infection-fatality ratio based on this table,[15] and assuming half the wider population caught Covid and only a small number (5%) of pensioners ended up getting it, that would still mean 90,000 extra deaths. If 15% of pensioners caught Covid in this scenario, it would mean 175,000 deaths. However, even this is likely to be an underestimate, for reasons discussed in our next point.(9)

The FAQsters' mathematics seems sound enough; what looks more questionable is their initial assumption, that over 40% of the adult population would need to be infected before reaching the herd immunity threshold (HIT). Consider that:

• they estimate an initial R number of 2.5-3.5% for Covid-19,(16) implying a HIT of 67-72%,
• estimates of the number of Brits who have already caught Covid-19 range from 15% to more than 20%,(17, 18) and
• over 30% have had at least one dose of a vaccine.(19)

Given these numbers, it is a stretch to think that a further 40%+ would need to acquire immunity before hitting the HIT. Given that vaccinations are rising much faster than infections, it is almost impossible to believe that all of those 40% would end up gaining immunity via infection instead. 

As with all of their points after their first point – "We have vaccines now" – the FAQsters are ignoring that first point, and arguing as if we do not have vaccines now.  They have simply recycled old anti-GBD arguments from last October, when there were no vaccines, and the coming of vaccines has not induced them to even re-examine, much less question, those earlier arguments and assumptions.

Vaccines or not, the above was never a good argument. It rests on the questionable assumption that lockdowns would somehow prevent all those deaths – whereas in fact the same number of people would be just as susceptible, at the very same risk of hospitalization and death, with a lockdown or without. Either way, the same number of people would have to be infected to reach the HIT, and ceteris paribus the same number of people could be expected to die in the process. All that a lockdown could do would be to reduce the R number, ‘flatten the curve,’ and slow down the death rate. Merely slowing down the death rate is not ‘saving lives’, but just kicking the corpses down the road.

Today, though, now that "We have vaccines", the idea that anywhere near that number would be infected and die in the absence of lockdowns looks like pure imagination. Dressing up imagined assumptions in mathematical dress (as in computer modelling) may give them a patina of scientific validity; but with maths (as with logic), the conclusions reached remain just as imaginary as the starting premises. 

[Six months after I wrote the above, there is evidence that vaccinated people are being infected and infecting others; so the FAQsters' may be right that 40% of Britons will eventually catch Covid-19. However, equally strong evidence shows that most vaccinated have strong protection against hospitalization and death. So, with more than 2/3 of Britons now fully vaccinated, their estimates of both deaths and hospitalizations still look implausibly high.]

 5) The health service would be overwhelmed in this scenario, leading to a potentially much higher death rate among the rest of the population. On top of the deaths we could expect based on the fatality rates from the pandemic so far, so many other people in the rest of the population would be hospitalised in the Great Barrington scenario that the NHS would be totally overwhelmed. Applying the hospitalisation rates from this article to the rest of the population, and assuming 50% of the younger population caught COVID along with 5% of pensioners, that would mean 860,000 people would be hospitalised. If 15% of pensioners accidentally caught the virus, it would mean around 1.1m hospitalisations. This would overwhelm the health service. There are only 4,123 adult critical care beds in England, so many or most patients requiring hospitalisation would not be able to receive full treatment, and would have a much higher mortality rate.

Since this argument is so similar to the previous one – with the same oudated assumptions, and the same failure to re-examine them – a reply can be brief. 

The only difference I can see this time is an added assumption that an increase in infections and hospitalisations would happen almost immediately; that, without lockdowns, everyone’s first thought would be to run out and happily (“merrily”) catch COVID-19. To which the best reply would be to remind the FAQsters of their next point: "Young people don't want the virus either." No one wants to catch Covid, ceterus paribus, and that gives everyone a reason to voluntarily distance. 

[Voluntary distancing, like lockdown, can slow the spread of a disease It is not meant to stamp out the disease, or to prevent hospitalizations and deaths; it is meant slow them down, to reduce the R number, and  'flatten the curve': the same hospitalizations (and deaths) happen over a longer time, and are kept below the point at which they "overwhelm" the health care system. It works no differently from lockdowns.

[How well voluntary distancing works compared to lockdown measures is an empirical question, best decided by comparing outcomes in countries that relied on it (Sweden, Japan) to those that relied on lockdowns.]

*  - [written October 6, 2021]

9. All quotations in italics are from: “Claim: The Great Barrington Declaration gives a good alternative to lockdown”, Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ.

15. Smriti Mallapaty, “The coronavirus is most deadly if you are older and male — new data reveal the risks”, Nature, August 28th, 2020.

16. “Claim: 99.5% survive Covid – we’re overreacting”, Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ.

17. “COVID-19: 15.3% of England’s population estimated to have had coronavirus by mid-January”, Sky News, February 3rd, 2021.

18. Ashley Kirk, Anna Leach and Pamela Duncan, “One in five in England have had Covid, modelling suggests”, The Guardian, January 10th, 2021.

19. “As It Happened: Vaccines for 20m in UK a magnificent achievement”, BBC, February 28th, 2021.

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Covid-19 FAQ vs GBD (5): Youth and Long Covid

Anti-virus: The Covid-19 FAQ on the Great Barrington Declaration 
V: Youth and Long Covid

by George J. Dance

from "A Defence of the Great Barrington Declaration from Its Powerful Critics", The Daily Sceptic, 22 March 2021. 

6) Younger, healthier people don’t want this virus either. Just because younger, healthier people who catch the coronavirus die at lower rates than the elderly or those with pre-existing medical conditions, it doesn’t mean that it’s fine for them to catch the virus. (9)

"Lower rates" sounds deliberately misleading; the FAQ's own cited source says that “For every 1,000 people infected with the coronavirus who are under the age of 50, almost none will die” and “The IFR [is] close to zero for people between the ages of 15 and 44” (15) . But that does not mean that young people have no risks at all. It is prudent for them to manage their risks, too.

I wish I could tell those young people to also get vaccinated. Unfortunately, they are not legally allowed to do so at this time [March 2021]; governments have monopolised the vaccines, and nobody is allowed to take them until their government lets them. As not just a Covid libertarian but a full libertarian, and in light of my earlier vaccine comments: I would like to see a legal vaccine market for those excluded from the Government program. That need not drain vaccines from the Government program: one possibility is a Right to Try law, letting people import, buy, and sell vaccines that have been authorised in other countries; a ‘Dallas Buyers Club’-type solution. Alas, governments have put themselves in charge; and they have decided that no one can receive a vaccine without their permission.

I can only advise those who do not want catch the virus, and cannot legally be vaccinated, to take the common-sense steps I mentioned earlier:  limit contacts, give other people their space, avoid crowded and closed-in spaces, take extra vitamins and zinc, and discuss with your doctor what else you can do.

Many sufferers of the coronavirus have found it to be an unpleasant few weeks, have been hospitalised, or have developed “Long Covid” – symptoms that persist long after the initial infection. The evidence for “Long Covid” is growing, although it remains inconclusive. Doctors from intensive-care units have written about their experience of watching as even young patients die from the disease. Hospitalisation rates, although highest for the elderly, have been accelerating in the UK across all age groups. Even for young people, Covid risks being far worse than just a bad cold or bout of the flu.

I know little about “Long Covid”, but I suspect I am not alone. As the John Snow Memorandum put it, “we still do not understand who might suffer from long COVID,"(3)  nor do we understand precisely what their 'suffering' entails. “Long Covid” is being used as a blanket term for a number of distinct syndromes and a whole host of symptoms, ranging from observed physical damage like scarring of the lung tissue, right through to purely patient-defined symptoms like “breathlessness, muscle pains, palpitations and fatigue”(20) (all of which I have suffered from myself through the lockdowns). The bottom line: the risks and harms of Long Covid are largely unknown.

Which appears to be the point. Normally one would expect extreme interventions to be supported by strong evidence; but if people are afraid enough of the unknown, a very lack of evidence can be used to justify extreme measures. That was the case in the March lockdowns, and it appears that a similar tactic is being tried here. Fortunately, this new variant of alarmism may not work as well. “We have to close everything, or millions may die!” has a certain cachet; “We have to close everything, or millions may have an unpleasant few weeks!”, not so much.

3. Nisreen A. Alwan et al., “Scientific consensus on the COVID-19 pandemic: we need to act now” The Lancet, October 15th, 2020.

9. All quotations in italics are from: “Claim: The Great Barrington Declaration gives a good alternative to lockdown”, Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ.

15. Smriti Mallapaty, “The coronavirus is most deadly if you are older and male — new data reveal the risks”, Nature, August 28th, 2020.

20. “Long COVID: let patients help define long-lasting COVID symptoms”, Nature, October 7th, 2020.

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Covid-19 FAQ vs GB Declaration (6): Conclusion

Covid-19 FAQ on the Great Barrington Declaration 
VI: Conclusion

by George J. Dance

from "A Defence of the Great Barrington Declaration from Its Powerful Critics", The Daily Sceptic, 22 March 2021.

 7) Natural herd immunity is bad for other reasons. Allowing a virus to go on jumping from person to person is a significant risk: it encourages the evolution of new variants, which might be more dangerous, undermining our response and our treatments. Even if a population develops herd immunity to a disease by infection, that doesn’t mean the disease will go away. Changes in the population (such as new births and migration) and waning immunity will mean that people will continue to be susceptible to the disease over time, and new outbreaks could still occur in the future. Every person who catches the disease gives it another opportunity to mutate; only with eradication can we be sure it will not develop into a more dangerous form. [9]

This is just more alarmism: more argument that we must lock down society, not because of what we know, but because of what we do not know. What it ignores is that, if natural immunity is 'bad' for those two reasons – virus mutation and immunity waning - then immunity from vaccination must be 'bad' for the same reasons. Viruses are always mutating (the SARS-CoV-2 has mutated constantly since last January), and there is always a possibility that a mutation will both be resistant to immunity (although none has to date) and more dangerous (though natural selection seems to imply that a less dangerous virus – one that keeps more of its hosts active in the community – would have an edge in spreading). And of course vaccine immunity, like acquired immunity, can also wane. The only way to end the chances of either occurring, as the FAQsters conclude, is through through global eradication of the virus, or Zero Covid.

Which brings us back to the FAQsters’ original point. Since “eradication” or Zero Covid (rather than herd immunity) is the end they have in sight, reaching that end could well be years or even decades in the future. (Eradicating smallpox took almost 200 years from the first vaccine.)[21] So how do we live until then? Do we have a free society, in which people manages their own lives (which includes managing their own health risks), or one in which a government manages their lives and risks for them?

Eliminating the disease in even a single country where it has taken root will involve further draconian intrusions (which will select for more contagious variants) for the foreseeable future. And even if that does lead to eradication in my or the FAQsters’ lifetime, it does not eliminate the risk of more pandemics in the future, and of the same cycle of interventions playing out again. If hypothetical risks like these, based on nothing but fears, are reasons for a lockdown now, then they are reasons for lockdown forever.  

To repeat what I said earlier, it will take some time before the end gets here, and until then either option – let people live their lives, or keep them locked down – is still very much a live one. The arguments for the lockdown option have always been weak, but for now the coming of vaccines has made them even weaker.

Sources (accessed March 9th-March 10th, 2020)

1. Great Barrington Declaration.
2. Gerritt Olivier, “Terrifying citizens with overwhelming statistics is no help during a pandemic”, Business Day, February 20th, 2021.
3. Nisreen A. Alwan et al., “Scientific consensus on the COVID-19 pandemic: we need to act now” The Lancet, October 15th, 2020.
4. “What is Anti-Virus”, Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ.
5. “Claim: Covid is only a problem for the elderly and vulnerable,” Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ.
6. Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson, “PM’s new policy guru takes Trump to task”, The Times, November 21st, 2020.
7. Jessica Elgot, Heather Stewart and Peter Walker, “Tory rebels fire warning shot as 42 MPs vote against stricter Covid measures”, The Guardian, October 13th, 2020.
8. Sam Bright, “CONSERVATIVES DIVIDED: Scourge of Lockdown Sceptics Neil O’Brien MP Receives Government Backing”, Byline Times, January 27th, 2021.
9. All quotations in italics are from: “Claim: The Great Barrington Declaration gives a good alternative to lockdown”, Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ.
10. Gavin Yamey, “This thread is brilliant”, Twitter, March 8th, 2021.
11. Dominic Lawson, “The second wave of Covid has drowned the sceptics’ delusions”, The Times, January 17th, 2021. 
12. Dominic Lawson, “This vaccine needles the lockdown sceptics”, The Times, December 6th, 2020.
13. Matthew Impelli, “Authors of Anti-Lockdown Great Barrington Declaration Suggest COVID Could Be Over in 2 Months With Vaccine”, Newsweek, December 7th, 2020.
14. Bernadette Hogan and Aaron Feis, “Cuomo wonders if coronavirus quarantine may have backfired in some cases”, New York Post, March 26th, 2020.
15. Smriti Mallapaty, “The coronavirus is most deadly if you are older and male — new data reveal the risks”, Nature, August 28th, 2020.
16. “Claim: 99.5% survive Covid – we’re overreacting”, Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ.
17. “COVID-19: 15.3% of England’s population estimated to have had coronavirus by mid-January”, Sky News, February 3rd, 2021.
18. Ashley Kirk, Anna Leach and Pamela Duncan, “One in five in England have had Covid, modelling suggests”, The Guardian, January 10th, 2021.
19. “As It Happened: Vaccines for 20m in UK a magnificent achievement”, BBC, February 28th, 2021.
20. “Long COVID: let patients help define long-lasting COVID symptoms”, Nature, October 7th, 2020.
21. Anna Medaris Miller, “It took 184 years to eradicate smallpox after a vaccine was developed — a reminder of what we may face with the coronavirus”, Business Insider, May 8th, 2020.

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