Jay Bhattacharya nominated for NIH director

Donald Trump’s nomination of Jay Bhattacharya to direct the U.S. National Institutes of Health is a major victory for science and academic freedom.

From "Fringe" to Mainstream | City Journal | John Thierry:

November 27, 2024 - "Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health [NIH], Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a 'quick and devastating published takedown' of Bhattacharya and his fellow 'fringe epidemiologists.' 

"Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom — and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet.... Bhattacharya promised yesterday to 'reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again.' 

"As NIH director, he would wield a potent tool to induce reform: money. Stanford and more than a dozen other universities each get more than $500 million annually in grants from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The NIH grants support not only researchers but also their universities’ bureaucracies, which collect a hefty surcharge to cover supposed overhead costs. The federal largesse has helped finance the administrative bloat at universities, including the expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI] bureaucracies under the Biden administration.... 

"Those priorities are about to change. Trump has vowed to rescind immediately Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to promote DEI. During his first term, Trump threatened to issue an executive order barring universities from receiving federal funds if they suppressed free speech. He didn’t issue that order, but ... the NIH director will already have the power to consider a university’s commitment to academic freedom in deciding whether or not to award funds. 

“'For science to thrive and progress, we must be open-minded and allow vigorous and passionate debate,' says Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard. 'Why should taxpayers subsidize universities that don’t allow that?' Kulldorff, an eminent epidemiologist, lost his job at Harvard after he ... joined with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford, to write the Great Barrington Declaration [GBD], a critique of lockdowns that was signed by tens of thousands of scientists and physicians.

"Bhattacharya, who has a Ph.D. in economics as well as an M.D. from Stanford, hung on to his job as professor of health policy at the latter’s medical school, but his views were taboo on campus. After he and colleagues did a field study at the start of the pandemic showing that the Covid fatality rate was much lower than the doomsday number used to justify lockdowns, they were vilified by academics and journalists, and Stanford subjected them to a two-month inquiry by an outside legal firm. (They were vindicated by the inquiry and also by subsequent research confirming their findings.) 

"As Bhattacharya has recounted, his department chairman blocked his attempt to hold a seminar discussing the Great Barrington Declaration, and the dean of epidemiology at Stanford circulated a petition at the medical school quoting him on Covid and asking the university to censor such speech. A dozen federal agencies successfully pressured social-media platforms to censor his speech, as revealed in the Twitter files and a lawsuit. Facebook removed a video of him discussing Covid policies in Florida; Twitter shadow-banned him by limiting the reach of his tweets, and Google 'deboosted' the [GBD] so that a search for it pointed users to criticism of it rather than the declaration itself.  

"So far, the academic and public-health establishments have ignored criticism of their abandonment of scientific principles during the pandemic — and the evidence that their lockdowns and other mandates were largely futile and enormously harmful.... But now Stanford and other universities will be facing new financial pressure from critics. Cost-cutters in the Trump transition team are already contemplating a reduction in the overhead surcharges that universities collect in research grants from the federal government. These surcharges are more than 50 percent at Stanford and nearly 70 percent at Harvard.... 

"If the NIH and other agencies start considering a school’s dedication to academic freedom when awarding grants, some elite universities could pay a price. Stanford and other universities at the top of the list of NIH beneficiaries don’t look so elite in the free-speech rankings of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Stanford ranks 218th of 257 schools, and others are even lower, including UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Harvard. The campus censors haven’t been swayed by abstract appeals to protect academic freedom, but perhaps they’ll rediscover that principle once they contemplate their budgets."

Read more: https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-taps-jay-bhattacharya-for-nih

Trump’s NIH Pick Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Was Right on COVID Lockdowns | Dad Saves America | November 27, 2024:

GBD co-author wins 2024 Zimmer Medal

Great Barrington Declaration co-author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an outspoken opponent of coercive public health measures and controls on scientific speech, has been awarded the 2024 Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom by the American Academy of Sciences and Letters.

Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya Awarded 2024 Zimmer Medal; Brian Conrad Awarded 2024 Barry Prize; Six Stanford Scholars Honored in Total | Hoover Institution (news release):

October 24, 2024 - "Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya was awarded the Zimmer Medal, and Brian Conrad was awarded a 2024 Barry Prize, by the American Academy of Sciences and Letters (the Academy). The Zimmer Medal, which honors outstanding courage in the defense of intellectual freedom, was awarded to Sir Salman Rushdie last year.... The awards were conferred last night by Academy President Donald W. Landry of Columbia University and Board Chair Sanjeev R. Kulkarni of Princeton University in a ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C....

Jay Bhattacharya in 2020. Photo by 

American Institute of Economic Research. 

CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

"'Last year we were delighted to honor Sir Salman Rushdie alongside other top minds of our time, and this year we are delighted to honor Jay Bhattacharya and a wonderful group of outstanding scholars,' said Academy President Dr. Donald Landry, M.D., Ph.D., who is also the Hamilton Southworth Professor of Medicine at Columbia University. 

"'Like other academies, we honor intellectual excellence, but our Academy is distinguished by a special accent on intellectual courage. All our new members this year reflect the independence of mind we strive to honor.'

"The Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom is presented annually to a public thinker who displays extraordinary courage in the exercise of intellectual freedom. The award is named in honor of the late University of Chicago President, who led the creation of the Chicago Principles, the gold standard of academic freedom that has been adopted by 110 colleges and universities. 

"In 2023, the inaugural Zimmer Medal was awarded to Sir Salman Rushdie, in recognition of his extraordinary leadership in the struggle for human freedom....

"Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. His research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics. His recent research focuses on the epidemiology of COVID-19 as well as an evaluation of policy responses to the epidemic. His broader research interests encompass the implications of population aging for future population health and medical spending in developed countries, the measurement of physician performance tied to physician payment by insurers, and the role played by biomedical innovation on health. He holds an MD and a PhD in economics, both earned at Stanford University....

"The American Academy of Sciences and Letters promotes scholarship and honors outstanding achievement in the arts, sciences, and learned professions. It encourages the fruitful exchange of ideas within academia and society at large by sponsoring occasions for scholarly interaction and providing platforms for the presentation and dissemination of scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering. An independent 501(c)(3) non-partisan organization, it offers public programming, supports promising young scholars, and promotes traditional liberal arts ideals and standards of intellectual excellence."

Read more: https://www.hoover.org/press/stanfords-jay-bhattacharya-awarded-2024-zimmer-medal-brian-conrad-awarded-2024-barry-prize

Ontario MD faces ruin for lockdown opposition

Brampton Ontario doctor Kulvinder Kaur Gill faces financial ruin after a libel suit against those who defamed her on social media for her opposition to Covid lockdowns was dismissed without trial and she was ordered to pay their legal fees. 

The Crucifixion of Kulvinder Kaur | Brownstone Institute | Clayton J. Baker, MD:

March 21, 2024 - "As a physician, I see the best of my generation being destroyed.... There is a great purge occurring in the medical establishment, a purge that runs along strict ideological and ethical lines. The issue of Covid-era 'misinformation' is the main pretext for this purge, but there is no reason to believe it will stop there. And although the American medical system is the most Pharma-captured and Deep State-riddled medical system in the world, this purge is by no means limited to the United States.

"The list of honest, courageous, and self-sacrificing physicians and scientists who have been fired, censored, de-licensed, defamed, subjected to lawfare, or otherwise persecuted in the name of Covid conformity is far too long to list. Just a very few of the names include Peter McCullough, Meryl Nass, and Martin Kulldorff in the USA, David Cartland and Ahmad Malik in the UK, and Kulvinder Kaur in Canada. 

"Dr. Kaur faces imminent financial ruin at the hands of the Canadian court system, which has imposed a punitive $300,000 ‘cost order’ upon her, due by the end of March 2024. This is in addition to other legal expenses she has incurred since the beginning of the Covid lockdowns. Dr. Kaur’s cardinal sin was speaking out against the harsh lockdowns imposed upon citizens of Ontario, where she practices medicine, treating mostly immigrant families and other poor members of the population.

"Stanford epidemiologist and Great Barrington Declaration co-author Jay Bhattacharya recently interviewed Dr. Kaur on his Illusion of Consensus podcast. I encourage readers to watch this interview. It is compelling for a number of reasons, not the least of which is this: Kulvinder Kaur comes across as the most modest, sincere, and likable person imaginable – quite literally the last person who would invoke the ire of any honest organization, and quite possibly the first person you would want as your personal physician.... Her combination of earnestness and modesty shines through her descriptions of both her first class education and scientific training and her clinical practice, devoted as it is to poor immigrants, in large part because she herself is an immigrant. 

"Prior to Covid, she says, she was a very conventional practitioner, observant of the standard vaccine schedules, and never in trouble with the authorities. But when the lockdowns began, she felt compelled by conscience to speak out against the collateral harms these repressive measures caused her patients. She cited sources such as the Great Barrington Declaration. She took to Twitter. She refused to shut up. And so, the Canadian establishment set out to destroy her.

"In her interview with Jay, Kulvinder Kaur appears to me to be very idealistic, sometimes almost to the point of naivete. At one point she states, 'I never thought that this would be the cost of speaking truth to power.' She seems genuinely surprised that even now, when her predictions from early in the pandemic have all been proven correct, she is still being persecuted. 

"The ideologues are hell-bent on destroying the idealist, and the idealist cannot understand why. But persecuted she is. The Canadian government, media, and medical establishment long ago determined that it would publicly crucify (and financially ruin) this highly intelligent, deeply moral, and utterly sincere young woman. They intend to make an example of her, just in case some other idealistic young physician is thinking of following in her footsteps.

"A GiveSendGo fund for Dr. Kaur’s financial crisis has been started, and I encourage readers to donate to it as soon as possible if they are able. She needs to raise $300,000 by the end of March. Hopefully the goal will be reached, and Dr. Kaur will be saved from financial ruin.

"But the ruin of medicine in the so-called Western democracies will continue apace. The best of my generation of physicians will be destroyed by the madness of their corrupt, captured, and deteriorating profession. And then where will patients turn for care?.... The outstanding, outspoken, and independent physicians will be run out of the profession. The remaining rank-and-file, already more submissive than their persecuted betters, will quietly comply with orders from above, knowing what will happen to them if they don’t. The newly minted doctors, freshly indoctrinated in today’s Pharma-driven curricula, and pre-selected for compliance via mandatory vaccinations and other human resource department litmus tests, will goose-step through their practice directives and clinical protocols, no questions asked."

Read more: https://brownstone.org/articles/the-crucifixion-of-kulvinder-kaur/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Anti-lockdown Advocate Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill Speaks Out For First Time | Dr. Jay Bhattacharya | March 16, 2024:

Legal Fund for Kulvinder on GiveSendGo.

DeSantis drops out of U.S. POTUS race

Ron DeSantis has dropped out of the race for president, and the chances of an inquiry into the USA's Covid response have dropped along with him, writes Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. 

Ron DeSantis drops out of presidential race and backs Trump | BBC News | Bernd Debusmann Jr & Kayla Epstein:

January 21, 2024 - "Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Donald Trump. He quit ahead of the Republican primary election in New Hampshire, where he was polling in the single digits..... In a nearly five-minute long video on X, formerly Twitter, released on Sunday afternoon, Mr DeSantis said his campaign had 'left it all out on the field'. 'If there was anything I could do to produce a favourable outcome - more campaign stops, more interviews - I would do it," he added.... 

"The Florida governor said he was endorsing Mr Trump, who is the clear frontrunner after winning the first contest in Iowa with 51% of the vote. Mr DeSantis said it had become clear that a majority of Republican voters 'want to give Donald Trump another chance'. He acknowledged 'disagreements' with the former president, but said Mr Trump was 'superior' to Mr Biden, who is almost certain to be the Democratic nominee in November's general election. 'I signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee, and I will honour that pledge,'" Mr DeSantis said.... DeSantis also took a swipe at [Nikki] Haley, calling her a member of 'the old Republican guard of yesteryear - a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism'.

Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68051757

Why did Ron DeSantis quit US presidential race? | BBC News | January 22, 2024:

Ron DeSantis was the last hope of a Covid reckoning | Unherd | Jay Bhattacharya:

January 22, 2024 - "I first spoke with Ron DeSantis, who yesterday dropped out of the US presidential race, when he cold-called me on a Sunday afternoon in September 2020.... We spoke for over two hours: on Covid-19 risk factors, on immunity, on the harms of lockdowns, and on the safety of opening schools.... The next day, the Governor invited me to a policy roundtable where he led a public discussion on Covid policy between me and fellow academics: the Nobel Prize-winning Stanford scientist Michael Levitt and the Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff. DeSantis then announced that he was lifting all remaining lockdown policies in Florida and would not institute them again....

"In autumn 2020, as California Governor Gavin Newsom kept pupils out of school, DeSantis ordered an in-person option for every child in Florida. Following the lack of high-quality randomised evidence suggesting community masking can effectively prevent Covid, DeSantis prohibited mask mandates in the state. In late 2020, when vaccines first became available, following evidence that older people were more than a thousand times more likely than teenagers to die from Covid infection and that the vaccine could reduce that risk, the Governor prioritised older people for vaccination ... at a time when public health authorities waffled on the topic.... In 2021, following evidence that vaccination did not prevent Covid transmission and so did not provide a public benefit to others besides the recipient, DeSantis rejected the coercive idea of vaccine mandates and passports. At a time when hospitals were preventing families from visiting with dying relatives, he enacted a humanitarian law guaranteeing visitation rights.

"What was the result of these policies? Since the beginning of the pandemic, Florida has had lower all-cause excess deaths, after adjusting for its older population, than California. DeSantis’s state protected human life better than locked-down California did, and it had better economic outcomes, including far lower unemployment and better educational outcomes for its school kids.

"One reason for the Republican reluctance to revisit the Covid era might be that many voters feel conflicted over their early support for lockdowns. They are thus loath to give DeSantis sufficient credit for his pandemic accomplishments. In this reading Trump, savvy operator that he is, has not proposed any honest evaluation of his Covid policies to avoid picking a scab that might make him — and much of the Republican electorate — look bad....

"There are two distinct and contradictory visions of the future now that DeSantis is gone from the presidential race. According to the pessimistic one, the lesson of DeSantis losing the Republican primary race is that Americans will never have an honest inquiry over the Covid policy fiasco. The more optimistic reading is that there may be one, but only if we can muster the grace to have it focus on providing lessons for future policy and not on political point-scoring. I’ll keep working towards the latter vision. But if it is the former, then lockdowns are a permanent fixture in the public health toolbox, and the population should plan accordingly for them to inevitably return."

Read more: https://unherd.com/thepost/ron-desantis-was-the-last-hope-of-a-covid-reckoning/

Appeals court upholds Missouri v. Biden injunction

The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a limited injunction against the federal government censoring social media. 

The Government Censored Me and Other Scientists. We Fought Back—and Won | The Free Press | Jay Bhattacharya:

September 11, 2023 - "When I was 19, I became an American citizen. It was one of the happiest days of my young life. The immigration officer gave me a civics test, including a question about the First Amendment. It was an easy test because I knew it in my heart. The American civic religion has the right to free speech as the core of its liturgy.... My parents had taught me that people here could criticize the government, even over matters of life and death, without worry that the government would censor or suppress us. But over the past three years, I have been robbed of that conviction. American government officials, working in concert with big tech companies, have attacked and suppressed my speech and that of my colleagues for criticizing official pandemic policies—criticism that has been proven prescient. 

"On Friday, at long last, the Fifth Circuit Court ruled that ... that the Biden administration did indeed strong-arm social media companies into doing its bidding. The court found that the Biden White House, the CDC, the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, and the FBI 'engaged in a years-long pressure campaign [on social media outlets] designed to ensure that the censorship aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints'.... According to the judges, 'the officials’ campaign succeeded. The platforms, in capitulation to state-sponsored pressure, changed their moderation policies'....

"The trouble began on October 4, 2020, when my colleagues and I — Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford — published the Great Barrington Declaration. The Declaration called for an end to economic lockdowns, school shutdowns, and similar restrictive policies on the grounds that they disproportionately harm the young and economically disadvantaged while conferring limited benefits to society as a whole. The Declaration endorsed a “focused protection” approach that called for strong measures to protect high-risk populations while allowing lower-risk individuals to return to normal life with reasonable precautions. Tens of thousands of doctors and public health scientists signed our statement....

"Four days after the Declaration’s publication, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, emailed Fauci to organize a 'devastating takedown' of it. Almost immediately, social media companies such as Google/YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook censored mentions of the Declaration.... [I]n 2021 Twitter blacklisted me for posting a link to the Great Barrington Declaration. YouTube censored a video of a public policy roundtable of me with Florida governor Ron DeSantis.... I am not a political person; I am not registered with either party.... Yet at the height of the pandemic, I found myself smeared for my supposed political views, and my views about Covid policy and epidemiology were removed from the public square on all manner of social networks....

"In August 2022, my colleagues and I finally had a chance to fight back. The Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general asked me to join as a plaintiff in their case, represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, against the Biden administration. The aim of the suit was to end the government's role in this censorship—and restore the free speech rights of all Americans in the digital town square.... The case revealed that a dozen federal agencies — including the CDC, the Office of the Surgeon General, and the Biden White House — pressured social media companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to censor and suppress even true speech contradicting federal pandemic priorities. For instance, in 2021, the White House threatened social media companies with damaging regulatory action unless it censored scientists who shared the demonstrable fact that the Covid vaccines do not prevent people from getting Covid.... 

"On Independence Day this year, federal Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction in the case, ordering the federal government to immediately stop coercing social media companies to censor protected free speech.... The government appealed, convinced it should have the power to censor scientific speech. An administrative stay followed and lasted much of the summer. But on Friday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit unanimously restored a modified version of the preliminary injunction, telling the government to stop using social media companies to do its censorship dirty work: 

Defendants, and their employees and agents, shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech. That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling the social media companies’ decision-making processes....

"The decision isn’t perfect. Some entities at the heart of the government’s censorship enterprise can still organize to suppress speech..... But ... the federal government can no longer threaten social media companies with destruction if they don’t censor on behalf of the government. The Biden administration, which has proven itself to be an enemy of free speech, will surely appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. But I am hopeful that we will win there, just as we have at every venue in this litigation. I am grateful for the resilience of the U.S. Constitution, which has withstood this challenge."

Read more: https://www.thefp.com/p/i-fought-government-censorship-and-won

Was Biden's social media meddling illegal? | ReasonTV | August 18, 2023: 

Twitter Files show evidence of secret blacklisting

Bari Weiss Twitter Files Reveal Systematic 'Blacklisting' of Disfavored Content | Reason - Robby Soave:

December 9, 2022 - "The second installment of the Twitter Files — disclosures about politically motivated content suppression on the platform — has been released, this time from independent journalist Bari Weiss. 'A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users,' writes Weiss.

"The previous installment, released by independent journalist Matt Taibbi, focused on the confused and chaotic decision on the part of Twitter executives to offer a "hacked materials" rationale for suppressing the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story; as such, the files mostly provided more evidence of what was already fairly well-known. The Weiss installment, on the other hand, offers significant evidence of something that many people merely suspected was taking place: wholesale blacklisting of Twitter accounts....

"Weiss provides several examples of ways in which the platform limited the reach of various high-profile users: Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor of medicine who opposed various COVID-19 mandates and lockdowns, was on a "trends blacklist," which meant that his tweets would not appear in the trending topics section; right-wing radio host Dan Bongino landed on a "search blacklist," which meant that he did not show up in searches; and conservative activist and media personality Charlie Kirk was slapped with a "do not amplify" label. At no point did anyone at Twitter communicate to these individuals that their content was being limited in such a manner.

"These actions, of course, sound a lot like 'shadow banning," which is the theory that Twitter surreptitiously restricts users' content, even in cases where the platform has not formally issued a ban or suspension. For years, various figures on the right and contrarian left have complained that the reach of their tweets had substantially and artificially diminished for nonobvious reasons, contrary to the stated claims of top-level Twitter staffers who steadfastly asserted: 'We do not shadow ban.' Twitter has publicly admitted that it suppresses tweets that 'detract from the conversation,' though the platform's plan was to eventually move toward a policy of informing users about suppression efforts—a move that never took place.

"If shadow banning is defined as secretly making a user's content utterly undiscoverable, even by visiting his own page, then it's technically true that there is no shadow banning. (Twitter seems to have defined the term that way.) But when most people complain about shadow banning, they are objecting to a secretive process of restricting, hiding, and limiting content in general, without informing users.... Under this definition, it's crystal clear that Twitter engages in shadow banning....

"The lack of transparency is startling, and the rationale behind the policy is wholly contrary to a culture of free speech. According to Weiss, previous Twitter Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth admitted in internal Slack conversations that 'the hypothesis underlying much of what we've implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that.'

"That's a very fraught proposition that would appear to justify an extreme amount of censorship. As always, it's important to keep in mind that social media moderators, misinformation beat reporters, federal health advisers, and national intelligence officials have all failed to correctly distinguish actual misinformation from true information — the New York Post laptop story being just one prominent example."

Read more: https://reason.com/2022/12/09/bari-weiss-twitter-files-elon-musk-blacklist-shadow-banning/

ZeroCovid group declares monkeypox a pandemic

World Health Network declares Monkeypox a pandemic | Mint: 

June 24. 2022 - "With 3,417 confirmed Monkeypox cases reported across 58 countries, World Health Network (WHN) has announced that they are declaring the current monkeypox outbreak a pandemic. The WHN announcement comes ahead of WHO [World Health Organiztion] meeting to be held on 23 June to decide on their monkeypox outbreak designation....

"The outbreak will not stop without concerted global action, [WHN] said. Even with death rates much lower than smallpox, unless actions are taken to stop the ongoing spread ... millions of people will die and many more will become blind and disabled, it said... WHN said that the essential purpose of declaring Monkeypox a pandemic is to achieve a concerted effort across multiple countries or over the world to prevent widespread harm.

"'There is no justification to wait for the monkeypox pandemic to grow further. The best time to act is now. By taking immediate action, we can control the outbreak with the least effort, and prevent consequences from becoming worse.... Any delay only makes the effort harder and the consequences more severe', said Yaneer Bar-Yam,* PhD, President of New England Complex System Institute and co-founder of WHN.

"'The WHO needs to urgently declare its own Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) — the lessons of not declaring a PHEIC immediately in early January 2020 should be remembered as a history lesson of what acting late on an epidemic can mean for the world,' said Eric Feigl-Ding,* PhD, Epidemiologist and Health Economist, and co-founder of WHN."
Read more: https://www.livemint.com/news/world/world-health-network-declares-monkeypox-a-pandemic-11655951549860.html

WHO: Monkeypox outbreak not yet a global public health emergency | Stat - Andrew Joseph:

June 25, 2022 - "The World Health Organization on Saturday declined to declare the unprecedented monkeypox outbreak that has spread around the world a public health emergency as of now. A public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC, grants the WHO director-general certain powers, such as the ability to recommend how countries should respond.... The announcement came after a WHO emergency committee met Thursday to discuss the outbreak. Some 3,000 cases have been documented since mid-May, ... outside the regions in West and Central Africa where the virus is endemic and has animal reservoirs. Most of the cases have been in gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men, with many occurring in men who have had multiple recent sex partners. One death has been reported, in an immunocompromised person....

"Gregg Gonsalves,* an associate professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, disagreed with WHO’s decision, which he called a 'punt.' He said he felt that the criteria had been met and that a PHEIC declaration could have pushed public health authorities to step up their response and coordinate better across countries. Gonsalves served as an adviser to the emergency committee, but did not have a say in whether to recommend a PHEIC be declared.

"Monkeypox infections can lead to painful lesions and rashes, including vesicles forming on the palms.... Many of the cases in the current outbreak have been comparatively mild, though some patients have been hospitalized for pain management as the infection runs its course.... In the current outbreak, ... the United States has reported 200 monkeypox cases, Germany has identified more than 675 cases, Portugal more than 300, and the United Kingdom more than 900. South Africa on Thursday also reported a case in a person who had no recent travel history....

"The PHEIC designation was created in an update to the International Health Regulations following the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak....The first PHEIC was declared for the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, and others have included Ebola outbreaks and the Zika epidemic. The two active PHEICs are for Covid-19 and the continued transmission of polio."
Read more: https://www.statnews.com/2022/06/25/who-monkeypox-outbreak-not-yet-a-global-health-emergency/ 

* signatory of the John Snow Memorandum 

NIH boss planned 'takedown' of Great Barrington Declaration scientists

Fauci, Emails, and Some Alleged Science | American Institute of Economic Research - Phillip W. Magness & James R. Harrigan:

December 19, 2021 - "From October 2-4, 2020, the American Institute for Economic Research hosted a small conference for scientists to discuss the Covid-19 lockdowns. Just four days later, Dr. Francis Collins, the retiring Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), would call ... three of the scientists in attendance 'fringe epidemiologists,' in a directive he sent to Anthony Fauci and other senior staff of his agency.... Those three, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford were simply doing what any good scientist would do: They were following the evidence. They wrote the Great Barrington Declaration [GBD] as they parted company at AIER, posting it for all to see.

"So why was Dr. Collins so intent on impugning these three scientists? It’s hard to know exactly, mostly because any scientist worth his salt should have been happy to see further research being done. That is, after all, how ignorance is replaced by knowledge. But Collins ... was pretty sure he knew all he had to know... In an email obtained by AIER through a Freedom of Information Act request, Collins told Anthony Fauci, CCing Lawrence Tabak, Deputy Ethics Counselor at NIH, that he wanted 'a quick and devastating published take down (sic)' of the Great Barrington Declaration’s premises. One wonders why he would CC the Deputy Ethics Counselor on this, given the trouble these people seem to have with ethics, but here they were in October of 2020. 

"Fauci wrote that same night to let Collins know that there was already a devastating take down of the Great Barrington Declaration…in that august scientific publication Wired.... There, science reporter Matt Reynolds told us there was no 'scientific divide' over herd immunity, but that’s not the funny part. The funny part came when Reynolds declared quite confidently that we no longer had anything to worry about, as lockdowns were – as of October 2020 – a thing of the past. 'The problem [with the GBD] is that we aren’t in lockdown,' Reynolds explained. '[I]t’s hard to find people who are advocating for a return to the lockdown we saw in March. When the Great Barrington Declaration authors declare their opposition to lockdowns, they are quite literally arguing with the past.'  This Fauci-endorsed passage may be one of the worst takes of the entire pandemic. Less than a month later, lockdowns came roaring back with a vengeance.

"Fauci wrote to Collins again the next day, this time referencing a breathless op-ed by Gregg Gonsalves*, a public health professor at Yale, in The Nation. And here we arrive at yet another funny part. Gonsalves’ article was not exactly a critique of the Great Barrington Declaration. Instead, Gonsalves went after Martin Kulldorff, who in an interview with the leftist magazine Jacobin quite reasonably pointed out that the lockdowns hurt the poor more than most talking heads were willing to admit. Gonsalves’s grievance was that by interviewing Kulldorff, Jacobin had broken the lockdown 'solidarity' of other far-left websites including the Nation and the Boston Review.

"By October 10, the lines were well drawn, and Fauci thrust himself into the middle of the media hootenanny that was clearly emerging. Collins emailed again to boast about calling the three scientists 'fringe' in the Washington Post, although he told Fauci that their ongoing campaign to take down the GBD 'will not be appreciated in the W[hite] H[ouse].' The White House, Fauci retorted, was 'too busy with other things to worry about' the GBD. There was an election to deal with, after all.

"As the bedfellows became more strange, Gregg Gonsalves wrote directly to Collins, thanking him for his undiplomatic approach. For his part, Gonsalves became ever more hostile and profane, in his remarks on the GBD. 'This f*****g Great Barrington Declaration is like a bad rash that won’t go away,' Gonsalves tweeted, shortly before reaching out to Collins. A day earlier, the Yale professor also began promoting unhinged conspiracy theories about the GBD and AIER that traced to the blog of a former 9/11 Truther movement activist. 

"Some of the emails between Collins and Fauci sent in response to AIER’s FOIA request have been redacted, but surrounding context makes it pretty clear that they were looking for a way to impugn the GBD further if it came up at the White House Covid Task Force meeting on October 16. That morning, Fauci emailed Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. He pressed the need for her to oppose the GBD, and set the stage for an attack on Scott Atlas, who was the most friendly champion of the GBD on the Task Force. Fauci, it turns out, had to miss the October 16 task force meeting, though he likely breathed a sigh of relief when Collins emailed him two days later. 'Atlas did not take part in the [task force] meeting on Friday,' Collins wrote, 'and the Great Barrington Declaration did not come up.' Another partially-redacted email hints that Fauci celebrated this outcome. Atlas’s opposition to the lockdown faction on the task force 'is driving Deb [Birx] crazy,' he continued.

"Fauci and Collins were not done, though.... Our story picks up again in earnest on November 2, when Fauci’s chief of staff Greg Folkers replied to an email that was not made public in pursuance to AIER’s FOIA request. It seems pretty clear, though, that Fauci asked Folkers for a list of sources that would allow him to argue effectively against the GBD. The email’s subject line references a previous correspondence from Fauci 'as discussed,' noting that Folkers had 'highlighted the three i found most useful' (sic).

"Multiple sources, and particularly Scott Atlas’s recently-published account of his time on the task force, have noted that Fauci often relies on aides to curate lists of sources in advance of his many media appearances. He seldom reads the scientific literature on Covid-19 himself, and instead arrives at meetings with staff-prepared talking points. It appears that Folker’s email was an answer to one such request for talking points to attack the GBD scientists.... 

"Fauci frequently portrays himself as a staunch defender of science who stays above the political divide and remains outside of partisan debates. In light of that, you might expect that Folker’s response to Fauci’s request would yield a small sample of scientific analysis on the logic behind lockdowns, even if only in a format bullet pointed by his staff. But you’d be wrong. Folkers sent Fauci a list of seven political op-eds and articles opposing the GBD from popular media outlets.

"So yeah. Science."

Read more: https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-emails-and-some-alleged-science/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

* - signatory of the John Snow memorandum

The Covid-19 pandemic has politicized science

With COVID-19, every disagreement became a culture-war flashpoint | Boston Globe - Jeff Jacoby: 

October 13, 2021 - "It was just over a year ago, on Oct. 4, 2020, that a group of doctors and medical experts, most of them specialists in epidemiology, immunology, and related public health disciplines, published a statement challenging the wisdom of the widespread COVID-19 lockdowns. The primary authors of the “Great Barrington Declaration” — it was named for the town in Western Massachusetts where it was drafted — were three scientists with blue-chip credentials: Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard; Sunetra Gupta, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Oxford; and Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and professor at Stanford Medical School.

"'Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people,' began the declaration, which was soon signed by thousands of additional public health scientists and doctors. 'Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.' The scientists warned that “keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.' They argued instead for a policy focused on protecting those most at risk from the virus, namely the old and infirm, while allowing others to resume normal life with common-sense precautions.The relatively brief declaration was accompanied by a much more detailed analysis of lockdowns and their collateral damage, and of the best ways to shield the elderly and people in other high-risk groups....

"Kulldorff, Gupta, and Bhattacharya expected their views to be challenged — after all, lockdowns had become the primary default strategy for containing COVID-19 in nearly every jurisdiction — but they never expected the whirlwind of denunciation and censure that their statement provoked. For a year, the three scientists have been 'vilified,' reported The Berkshire Eagle last week. Bhattacharya told the paper he is worried for his safety 'amid a campaign to censor him on the [Stanford] campus where he has worked for 35 years.' Harvard’s Kulldorff said he, too, 'continues to face denunciation.' Reflecting on their experience in an essay for the British website Spiked, the scientists expressed astonishment that their good-faith critique of the lockdown strategy caused them to be subjected to a 'multi-pronged propaganda campaign' and demonized for their views.

"But that’s been the story of this pandemic. As with so much else in contemporary American life, every disagreement has been turned into an ideological battle.... Whether the subject was lockdowns, masking, social distancing, vaccination, the origins of the virus, or even what the disease should be called, dogmatism consistently drowned out honest debate. There should have been a lively, ongoing process of questioning, testing, and revising scientific insights into COVID-19 and how best to confront it. Yet too many people preferred to dig in their heels, refusing to acknowledge that critics or dissidents might have a legitimate point. Again and again, on both the right and the left, people have insisted on viewing public health measures through a political or partisan lens.

"In retrospect, it seems clear that the Great Barrington authors were on target in doubting the advisability of sweeping lockdowns. Numerous studies have found that shutting down the economy was largely futile in preventing COVID’s spread and achieved little that could not have been done through less restrictive means. Whatever effect the lockdowns had on containing the coronavirus, there is no disputing that they damaged public health in many other ways, including domestic abuse, mental illness and addiction, anxiety and depression among children, deterioration in oral health, missed cancer diagnoses, and thousands of additional deaths from untreated heart disease.

"None of this means that the Great Barrington Declaration was unassailably correct, let alone that its prescriptions, if adopted, might not have caused other problems. But did it have to become a flashpoint in the culture war? In the midst of a pandemic, respected epidemiologists ought to be able to raise questions about prevailing public health policy without being savaged as fools or apostates. The fact that they couldn’t is appalling, and should make all of us uneasy, lockdown supporters and detractors alike."

Read more: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/10/13/opinion/with-covid-19-every-disagreement-became-culture-war-flashpoint/

Vaccine passports are instruments of control

Vaccine Passports Prolong Lockdowns | Wall Street Journal - Martin Kulldorff & Jay Bhattacharya:

April 6, 2021 - "As tens of millions are inoculated against Covid-19, officials in places as diverse as New York state, Israel and China have introduced 'vaccine passports,' and there’s talk of making them universal. The idea is simple: Once you’ve received your shots, you get a document or phone app, which you flash to gain entry to previously locked-down venues—restaurants, theaters, sports arenas, offices, schools.

"It sounds like a way of easing coercive lockdown restrictions, but it’s the opposite. To see why, consider dining. Restaurants in most parts of the U.S. have already reopened, at limited capacity in some places. A vaccine passport would prohibit entry by potential customers who haven’t received their shots. It would restrict the freedom even of those who have: If you’re vaccinated but your spouse isn’t, forget about dining out as a couple.

"Planes and trains, which have continued to operate throughout the pandemic, would suddenly be off-limits to the unvaccinated. The only places where restrictions would be relatively eased would be those still fully locked down, such as many live-event venues and schools. Yet even there, the passport idea depends on keeping the underlying restrictions in place — giving officials an incentive to do so for much longer as leverage to overcome vaccine resistance.

"The vaccine passport should therefore be understood not as an easing of restrictions but as a coercive scheme to encourage vaccination. Such measures can be legitimate: Many schools require immunization against common childhood illnesses, and visitors to some African countries must be vaccinated against yellow fever. But Covid vaccine passports would harm, not benefit, public health. The idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is as scientifically baseless as the idea that nobody does. 

"Covid vaccines are essential for older, high-risk people and their caretakers and advisable for many others. But those who’ve been infected are already immune. The young are at low risk, and children — for whom no vaccine has been approved anyway — are at far less risk of death than from the flu. If authorities mandate vaccination of those who don’t need it, the public will start questioning vaccines in general.

"Effective public health relies on trust. The public has lost trust in officials in part because they’ve performed poorly — relying on lockdowns to disastrous effect — and in part because they’ve made clear their distrust of the public. Trust, after all, is a two-way street. Coercive vaccination policies would erode trust even further. Even well-informed people may legitimately wonder: Why are they forcing me to take this shot if it’s so good for me?

"Vaccine passports are unjust and discriminatory. Most of those endorsing the idea belong to the laptop class — privileged professionals who worked safely and comfortably at home during the epidemic. Millions of Americans did essential jobs at their usual workplaces and became immune the hard way. Now they would be forced to risk adverse reactions from a vaccine they don’t need.... 

"The widespread use of vaccines against polio, measles, mumps, rubella, rabies and other pathogens has saved millions of lives. Vaccines are one of the most important inventions in human history — the reason that before last year many in the West had forgotten that infectious disease could pose a populationwide threat. Those pushing for coercive Covid vaccination threaten all this progress by undermining public trust in vaccines. In this sense, they are more dangerous than the small group of so-called anti-vaxxers have ever been."

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/vaccine-passports-prolong-lockdowns-11617726629

Bhattacharya looks back on lockdowns

Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford Doctor, Calls Lockdowns the 'Biggest Public Health Mistake We've Ever Made' | Newsweek - Matthew Impelli:

March 8, 2021 - "Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford University Medical School, recently said that COVID-19 lockdowns are the 'biggest public health mistake we've ever made...The harm to people is catastrophic'.... Bhattacharya, who made the comments during an interview with the Daily Clout, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a petition that calls for the end of COVID-19 lockdowns, claiming that they are "producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health."

"As of Monday, the Great Barrington Declaration has received signatures from over 13,000 medical and public health scientists, more than 41,000 medical practitioners and at least 754,399 'concerned citizens.'

"During the interview last month, Bhattacharya said that the declaration comes from 'two basic facts.' '"One is that people who are older have a much higher risk from dying from COVID than people who are younger ... and that's a really important fact because we know who his most vulnerable, it's people that are older. So the first plank of the Great Barrington Declaration: let's protect the vulnerable,' Bhattacharya said. 'The other idea is that the lockdowns themselves impose great harm on people. Lockdowns are not a natural normal way to live'....

"In an email sent to Newsweek, Bhattacharya wrote:

I stand behind my comment that the lockdowns are the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years. We will be counting the catastrophic health and psychological harms, imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth, for a generation.

At the same time, they have not served to control the epidemic in the places where they have been most vigorously imposed. In the US, they have – at best – protected the "non-essential" class from COVID, while exposing the essential working class to the disease. The lockdowns are trickle down epidemiology.

"Last week, Republican Governors in Texas and Mississippi announced the end to their statewide mask mandates, as well as allowing a majority of businesses to reopen."

Read more: https://www.newsweek.com/stanford-doctor-calls-lockdowns-biggest-public-health-mistake-weve-ever-made-1574540

WHO tightens guidelines on use of PCR tests

Appropriate use of PCR needed for a focused response to the pandemic | The Hill - Tom Nicholson & Jay Bhattacharya:

January 29, 2021 - "On January 13, 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a little-noticed technical report that calls into question many of the policies that we have adopted to control the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. At the heart of all the data on COVID-19 cases is the reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test, which can detect the virus in nasal swabs. The test is used, sensibly, to guide medical treatment for patients who display COVID-19 symptoms. Less sensibly, it is often used to identify people with no symptoms at all as positive 'cases' and impose long quarantine periods on them.

"The WHO’s guidance on the RT-PCR test emphasizes two things that have long been known in the scientific literature and public health practice but inexplicably ignored in COVID policy for almost a year. First, they point out that a positive COVID test does not necessarily mean that someone has any capacity of infecting someone else with the virus. Therefore, it instructs laboratories to report a key statistic that indicates how likely a positive test result actually constitutes infectious COVID-19. And second, the WHO warns against relying on a single test for patients without clinical COVID-19 symptoms....

"[T]he PCR test is not designed to identify active infectious disease but rather genetic material (dead, alive or partial) from the virus. PCR amplifies this material in samples to find traces of COVID-19, so while it often identifies people with active, infectious disease, it can also indicate people as 'positive' erroneously. Dead COVID-19 RNA in the nose or mouth of someone who was never sick could create a positive PCR result. Recovered patients who test negative and are non-infectious can still come up positive repeatedly in the following months. These are neither new cases nor infectious ones needing quarantine but could be incorrectly counted as such.

"Multiple studies show that the number of amplification or duplication 'cycles' performed via PCR to amplify the sample has a relationship with infectiousness — at a certain point, the more cycles needed to get positivity from a sample the generally less viral replication the sample shows. An article in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases found that among positive PCR samples with a cycle count over 35 – a common lab occurrence – only 3 percent of samples showed viral replication. Simply put, the cycle number next to the test is associated with the chances of infectiousness and should be available to the patient and the public. Thankfully, the WHO now explicitly recommends this.

"Setting aside the critical issue of purely false positives from contamination, reporting errors and lab deficiencies, there are many dangers of these 'weak' positive diagnoses (as the WHO terms them), which can waste resources and upend a family’s life. Among the harms include the obvious financial harm from needless isolation, social harm from misdirected public resources and psychological harm stemming from a positive diagnosis of COVID, and the stigma associated with it. And since the falsely identified 'case' is not actually infectious, there is no corresponding benefit in slowing disease spread by a forced quarantine period for the person and their contacts.

"Dr. Anthony Fauci himself told This Week in Virology in July, 'If you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more ... the chances of it being replication-competent are minuscule.' Why then has our national testing standard never reflected this? PCR providers should work with other labs to perform a random viral culture on those who received positive results, to validate their tests in terms of being an indicator of infectiousness. Other states should emulate Florida in requiring laboratories to report cycle times to providers and to public health officials so they can provide better advice to patients and make more nuanced decisions about mandatory quarantine orders.

"The WHO’s second recommendation makes good sense as well. When the PCR test reports a weakly positive signal – a sample that requires so many amplification cycles that the likelihood of an infectious sample is unlikely – there should be an additional test conducted on the same patient before any determination by either clinicians or public health officials about COVID-19 infection is made.

"There are two possibilities indicated by a weak positive test. First, the patient is in the early stages of infection and the number of copies of the virus is growing. In that case, a second test, with a sample drawn 24 hours later, should produce a stronger positive signal. Second, if the patient is not infectious, a second test will register either the same weak positive signal or a negative signal. We can thus overcome the limitations of false positivity by repeat testing ... not exclusively relying on single PCR results, by combining results with symptom information for clinical decision-making, and considering risk factors."

Read more: https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/536539-appropriate-use-of-pcr-needed-for-a-focused-response-to-pandemic

Study finds no clear benefit from Covid lockdowns

COVID Lockdowns May Have No Clear Benefit vs Other Voluntary Measures, International Study Shows | Newsweek - Nataile Colarossi:

January 14, 2021 - "A study evaluating COVID-19 responses around the world found that mandatory lockdown orders early in the pandemic may not provide significantly more benefits to slowing the spread of the disease than ... voluntary measures, such as social distancing or travel reduction. The peer reviewed study was published in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation on January 5, and analyzed coronavirus case growth in 10 countries in early 2020.

"The study compared cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the U.S. – all countries that implemented mandatory lockdown orders and business closures – to South Korea and Sweden, which instituted less severe, voluntary responses. It aimed to analyze the effect that less restrictive or more restrictive measures had on changing individual behavior and curbing the transmission of the virus. The researchers used a mathematical model to compare countries that did and did not enact more restrictive lockdown orders, and determined that there was 'no clear, significant beneficial effect of [more restrictive measures] on case growth in any country.'

"'We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of coordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures,' the research said. However, the researchers also acknowledged that the study had limitations, and noted that 'cross-country comparisons are difficult,' since nations may have different rules, cultures, and relationships between their government and citizenry.

"The study was conducted by researchers affiliated with Stanford University, and was co-authored by Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine and economics who has been a vocal opponent of coronavirus lockdowns since March. Bhattacharya was also among a group of scientists who wrote The Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial statement that encouraged governments to lift lockdown restrictions to achieve herd immunity among young and healthy people, while focusing protections on the elderly.

"For additional context, other studies have oppositely determined that lockdown orders have effectively saved millions of lives. A study published in the journal Nature by researchers at Imperial College London in June [concluded] that some 3.1 million deaths had been averted due to lockdowns across Europe early on in the pandemic....

"Mandatory lockdown orders have also been a highly politicized issue across the U.S. Some Republican leaders, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves, have vehemently opposed state or nationwide closures to curb the spread of COVID-19. In Democratic states, including New York and California, lockdown orders have been a consistent part of the coronavirus response since March.

"According to a poll released by Vox and Data for Progress on December 24, more than half of Americans said they would support a nationwide lockdown for one month. But President-elect Joe Biden [who called for a nationwide lockdown in March - gd] said in an interview in November that he had no intention of implementing a national shutdown when he takes office on January 20.

"'I'm not going to shut down the economy. I'm going to shut down the virus,' Biden said. 'There is no circumstance which I can see that would require a total national shutdown. I think that would be counterproductive'....

"Newsweek reached out to an author of the Stanford study for comment, but did not hear back in time for publication."

Read more: https://www.newsweek.com/covid-lockdowns-have-no-clear-benefit-vs-other-voluntary-measures-international-study-shows-1561656

Read study: Erin Bendavid, Christopher Oh, Jay Bhattacharya, John Ioannidis, "Assessing Mandatory Stay‐at‐Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID‐19," European Journal of Clinical Investigation," Jan. 5, 2021.   https://doi.org/10.1111/eci.13484 

Trump administration reportedly supports Great Barrington Declaration

White House Embraces Herd Immunity in Latest Push to End COVID-19 Lockdowns | Newsweek - Elizabeth Crisp:

October 12, 2020 - "The White House is doubling down on its push to reopen the economy, now openly embracing a herd immunity strategy at the urging of some health experts. Two senior advisers told Newsweek and other media outlets on Monday that the Trump administration supports the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial document that argues against lockdowns and calls for a reopening of schools, businesses and other entities, while protecting people deemed vulnerable to the virus because of age or other risk factors.

"'I think Americans should be cautiously optimistic about what's going on here,' one of the officials said. The officials were not authorized to speak on-the-record about the matter, but both defended the decision to move toward a broad-scale reopening, even though at least 5,900 people in the United States died with COVID-19 last week. The coronavirus has contributed to the deaths of more than 214,000 people in the U.S. since the pandemic began earlier this year [more than half of those before June 1, when most of the country was under lockdowns - gd]....

"World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters during a virtual press briefing on Monday that such an approach would be 'unethical.' 'Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it,' he said. President Donald Trump has mentioned the idea in the past, mistakenly referring to it as 'herd mentality'....

"The Great Barrington Document, released last week, was authored by Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University. Thousands of additional scientists have signed onto the open petition.... '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,' the open letter reads. 'Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.'

"The White House official described the Great Barrington Declaration as focusing on 'aggressive protection of the vulnerable, opening all schools, opening businesses in society and ending the prolonged lockdowns.' 'We've learned a lot about the virus — this isn't April,' the official said, defending the push to fully restore business and social activity. 'It's very clear who are high risk and who are not high risk.'

"One official noted that thousands of college students have returned to campuses this fall, resulting in several hundred positive cases but few hospitalizations and no known deaths. The official [attributed] the high number of cases [to] colleges mandating testing, even among students who show no COVID-19 symptoms.

"'The goal is to make sure that we can do everything we can to protect the high risk people, while understanding that healthy people can get back to work," the official argued. The official said the White House would continue to support other public mitigation efforts, including social distancing, aggressive hand-washing and cleaning and mask-wearing, when appropriate."

Read more: https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-embraces-herd-immunity-latest-push-end-covid-19-lockdowns-1538430

Scientists call for new coronavirus strategy

 AIER Hosts Top Epidemiologists, Authors of the Great Barrington Declaration | American Institute of Economic Research:

October 5, 2020 - "October 1-4, 2020, the American Institute for Economic Research hosted a remarkable meeting of top epidemiologists, economists, and journalists, to discuss the global emergency created by the unprecedented use of state compulsion in the management of the Covid-19 pandemic. The result is The Great Barrington Declaration, which urges a 'Focused Protection' strategy. 

"After a brief explanation of the strategy, and a discussion of the astonishing costs of lockdown, the Declaration concludes: '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.'

The primary authors and signers of the document are 

• Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Professor, Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
• Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor,  Medicine, Stanford University.
• Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Professor, Theoretical Epidemiology, University of Oxford.

Read more (including text of Declaration): https://www.aier.org/article/aier-hosts-top-epidemiologists-authors-of-the-great-barrington-declaration/