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

Sunetra Gupta explains how viruses work

A Framework for Understanding Pathogens, Explained by Sunetra Gupta | Brownstone Institute - Jeffrey A. Tucker: 

June 19, 2021 - "Early last year, ... the lockdown lobby relied on argument by intimidation. They know about viruses. You do not. They know about public health. You do not. They have precise and complex models. You do not. They have university appointments and positions of power. You do not. People who would normally favor the primacy of liberty, property, and law fell silent, as if intellectually outgunned. The public, lacking knowledge too, acquiesced to lockdowns. The politicians panicked, throwing out everything they thought they knew about good governance.... 

"Thus did I embark on a long journey to learn about the history of pandemics, the cell biology of viruses and their interaction with the human population, the relationship between pandemics and the eventual endemic equilibrium, herd immunity and vaccinations, and all of the other features of infectious disease that have become so heavily debated this year.... I’ve lost count of the number of books I’ve read, including even medical school textbooks on viruses (what a slog!) as well as countless papers, in addition to probably one hundred hours of lectures online.... 

"I just finished one book that stands out, and that I wish I had read a year and a half ago. It’s brilliant, erudite, precise, evocative to the point of being visionary, and capable of completely shifting one’s view toward pathogens and the social order. It is a work of genius.... The author is the legendary Oxford University theoretical epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, one of the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration. The title of the book I find rather regrettable because it sounds coldly clinical rather than literary: Pandemics: Our Fears and the Facts.... Dr. Gupta, I suspect, wrote this book to familiarize readers with the normalcy of pathogens, and to explain why it is not likely that an entirely new and deadly disease will arrive to wipe out large swaths of the human race.... 

"With computer viruses, the way to deal with them is to block them.... One exposure could mean data loss, identity theft, and even machine death. Despite what Bill Gates seems to believe, our bodies are not the same. Exposure to milder forms of germs works to protect us against more severe forms. The cell memory of our body is trained through experience, not by blocking all bugs but by incorporating the capacity to fight them off into our biology. This is the essence of how vaccines work, but more than that, it is how our whole immune system works. Pursuing an agenda of zero-pathogenic exposure is the road to disaster and death. We did not evolve that way and we cannot live this way. Indeed we will die if we take the route. 

"I hesitate to put any words in Professor Gupta’s mouth but I will try to summarize the one major lesson of this book. Pathogens will always be with us, their forms always changing, and thus the best protection we have against severe outcomes from those that threaten us is immunities built by exposure to milder forms of them. She explores this idea in great depth, applies it to past pandemics, and examines the implications for the future....

"The applications of this general principle are wide. Why was the Spanish flu so virulent against young people while mainly sparing old people? She speculates that there had been a whole generation of young people who had lacked exposure to influenzas. The records indicate that for the 20 years prior, there had been no major flu outbreaks, so when this one hit following the Great War, it was particularly cruel against those with naive immune systems, most of whom were between 20 and 40 years old. By contrast, the elderly had been exposed to a flu earlier in their lives that imbued them with natural immunity from this more deadly one.

"Does this mean that with every new pathogen we can and must expect widespread death before its harms are minimized? Not at all. With most pathogens, there is a negative correlation between severity and prevalence. Viruses with unimpressive performance kill their host quickly and thereby do not spread – Ebola is the classic case here.... 

"However, widespread death isn’t necessary before the pathogen population collapses and dies — there will come a point in the natural course of every epidemic when a non-immune host will become very hard to find, and most infections will have been cleared before they’ve had a chance to transmit. This is because the density of susceptible hosts will have fallen, either because they are now immune or dead. And so the epidemic will start to diminish and will eventually burn itself out. Once the disease has run its course, the host population can start to recover and attempt to return to its original density. In time, the proportion of susceptible individuals in a population becomes high enough for the disease to make a comeback, but — unless a disease does not revisit a population for a very long time — the second epidemic will always be smaller, and the third time, smaller still. This is because much of the population will still be immune each time another epidemic occurs. Eventually, an equilibrium is reached where the infectious agent kills a constant number of individuals every year, which is a very small proportion of what it could achieve in ‘virgin soil’. At this stage, the disease is said to be ‘endemic’ rather than epidemic.

"To be sure, the reaching of this endemic equilibrium does not mean that the virus is no longer a threat. When a virus encounters a generation or a tribe or a territory where immune memory is unprepared, it can indeed be wicked once again. The struggle between us and the bugs is unending but our bodies have well equipped us with huge advantages, so long as we are wise about its biological management."

Read more: https://brownstone.org/articles/a-framework-for-understanding-pathogens-explained-by-sunetra-gupta/

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

Pandemics: Our Fears and the Facts on Amazon

Lockdowns and free speech

The cost of being a lockdown sceptic - The Critic - Alexander Adams: 

F\ebruary 5, 2021 - "In December, the weather changed. When lockdown was re-imposed in England, cold winds blew for public figures who questioned the government’s handling of Covid-19. These figures were ... established commentators who understood that Covid-19 is potentially dangerous and that practical measures (including vaccines) were reasonable responses. These critics pointed out the apparent ineffectiveness of mass lockdowns, the increased toll of missed diagnoses and deferred/cancelled treatments, impact of school closures, rising mental-health problems and astronomical public debt.

"For presenting reasonable grounds for concern, sceptical journalists and broadcasters such as Maajid Nawaz, Peter Hitchens, Allison Pearson, Toby Young and Julia Hartley-Brewer – as well as respected health specialists and scientists Professor Sunetra Gupta, Professor Carl Heneghan and others – faced public execration. Prominent figures who accused them of not taking Covid-19 seriously included Piers Morgan, Neil O’Brien MP, journalists Paul Mason and Dan Hodges, Dr Hilary Jones and others, not mentioning officials and cabinet ministers. They appeared to disagree less with the lockdown sceptics’ points of view, and more the fact that they were allowed to dissent in the first place....

"Where were the unequivocal statements defending press freedom and willingness to scrutinise government action? There was near silence. Lockdown has exposed many free-expression supporters as fair-weather friends of open discussion.

"Regardless of whether or not the actions were justified, the greatest withdrawal of civil liberties in peace-time – perhaps ever in modern Western history – deserved of the commentariat more than a collective shrug. Vocal defenders of dissident writers in distant lands have nothing to say about peaceful protestors in their own country being detained, fined and cautioned. Feminist writers, who made careers out of lamenting the burden of domesticity upon women, have no public reaction to the plight of single mothers made unemployed and effectively housebound while also home-schooling multiple children simultaneously....

"Doubtless the silence has multiple causes. It is not only hypocrisy, although that certainly is a factor. A web of social conformity, career preservation, misdirected compassion and timidity also play a part. Data hardly comes into it, regrettably. People react emotionally and follow personal impulses, using factual evidence to support their outlooks.

"The division seems to be not a right-left one, although the political left does seem to break in support of lockdowns more strongly than the right does. The division is dictated by our moral compasses and our innate responses to authoritarianism and liberty. (Jonathan Haidt lucidly explains this in the book The Righteous Mind.) We have all seen cancel culture run rampant. Being tarred and feathered as an anti-vaxxer is threat enough to silence most supporters of free speech. Indeed, on the political left, free speech is now a 'white supremacist dog-whistle' – free speech is merely cover deployed for spreading hate speech.

"As has ever been the case, tyrants justify new encroachments on freedom as A) due to extraordinary circumstances, B) temporary, C) for the greater good and D) to protect the vulnerable. They portray dissent as dangerous, irresponsible and contrary to the facts. This is apparent in even the most cursory reading of history, yet today there are historians who cannot see retraction of our liberties as at all familiar. Or rather, they can see it, and rationalise their compliance as reasonable in the light of exceptional conditions. What today’s situation shows is exactly how courageous dissenters in religious and political tyrannies are. Sitting at home, on furlough, with no threat of arrest, advocates of civil liberties will not even issue mild support for the right to question government policy.

"Any individual who holds prominence in public life by defending civil liberties and who has remained silent on the widespread pillorying of lockdown sceptics has forfeited the right to be treated with seriousness and respect. It does not matter whether or not one supports the sceptical position. What matters is that people defend the right to question the efficacy of lockdowns in curbing the impact of an endemic virus.... Regardless of successes and failures of Covid-19 policy, individual intellectuals, journalists and academics – and the intelligentsia as a class – have failed in the most public way possible to defend free speech. It is a pitiful performance."

Read more: https://thecritic.co.uk/the-cost-of-being-a-lockdown-sceptic/

The importance of Sweden

The importance of Sweden

by George J. Dance

"One baffling feature of 2020," British Tory MP Neil O'Brien recently wrote in the New Statesman, "was that so much energy was wasted puffing up Sweden." Over at The Guardian, OpenDemocracy editor Peter Geoghegan echoed: "why, as the UK experienced one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks, did so many prominent public figures spend so much of 2020 talking about Sweden?" 

I cannot say for sure why they talked about it (and I suspect neither writer wants an answer anyway), but I can explain why I keep writing about it. (Full disclosure: I have written seven articles on the country.) 

First, Sweden notoriously did not have a lockdown in 2020. Lockdowns were an unprecedented experiment in totalitarianism, justifiable only if they were the only way to prevent mass death. Whether lockdowns can be justified, then, depends on the factual question of whether they prevented mass death; which can only be answered by comparing real-world outcomes between countries that locked down and those that did not. Outlier nations like Sweden that remained open act as controls in the real-world lockdown experiment; the question to be asked about them being, how well did they do versus the closed societies? Without those real-world examples to give us real facts, we would have only guesses embodied in models. 

The original lockdowner prediction, from a model, was that Sweden's health care system would collapse, and it would suffer ~96,000 deaths by May. Contrary to an internet rumor, that modelling was not done by Neil Ferguson and Imperial College; it did, though, borrow its assumptions from Ferguson's infamous March 16 Imperial death model report, which forecast 200,000 British deaths under mitigation (also by May) versus just 20,000 with suppression. All three of the above forecasts were wildly wrong – one would say, comically wrong, if there were anything comical about human death – hence the need for real-world comparisons like the one Sweden offered to the locked-down countries of Europe. If every government had been pushed into locking down, there would be no factual basis for comparison, and we would have to rely on the guesswork of specialists. 

The British government opted in March for a Swedish-style mitigation strategy, but was forced to pull a U-Turn a week later in the face of widespread media and public criticism (including a nasty Twitter campaign accusing Boris Johnson of genocide). Britain was locked down on March 23; that very same day, a similar media campaign began against Sweden. The past 40 weeks since have seen a steady stream of articles – more than five every week – pronouncing the failure of the Swedish "experiment" [sic], like a stopped clock. (See my bibliography, "Sweden-bashing in the media".) The intent may be to convince the world that mass death has occurred in Sweden, or to panic the Swedes into their own U-Turn; either could be used as a victory for lockdowners in their propaganda war.

That brings me to my second reason for writing on the topic: many of those articles are pure propaganda, full of out-of-context claims, cherry-picked facts and outright misrepresentations that call out for rebuttal. On the other hand, even a stopped clock can be right; such articles should be checked not only for what may be wrong in them, but for what may be right.      

Admittedly, I sometimes get tired of writing in the genre. Over and over I find myself reading the same assertions I have already dealt with, and writing the same things in reply. This writing is not a creative act, but simple drudge work I sometimes wish someone else would do. Balancing that off, though, is my third reason for writing them: my articles have been somewhat popular, one getting a satisfactory 2,000 reads. So it is once more into the breach, to deal with these two latest examples. 

Geohegan's article is actually about a shadowy conspiracy involving "backbench Tory MPs, anonymously funded thinktanks and ubiquitous media commentators" that oppose lockdowns, so he deals with the alleged failure almost in passing: 

We now know with certainty what public health experts have long predicted: a light-touch coronavirus approach does not work. Sweden has recorded far higher death rates than its Nordic neighbours, while suffering a similar economic hit. Even the country’s king thinks it has 'failed'."

The first sentence is recycled claims I have dealt with before (and deal with again, later on), but the second is new. Geohegan seems to be implying that the King of Sweden was calling the country's 'light-touch' strategy a failure. Where did he get that idea? Probably from an earlier Guardian story, "King of Sweden blasts country's 'failed' coronavirus response," which declared in the subhead that the royal "Criticism of anti-lockdown stance comes as hospitals struggle to cope with surge in cases". Reading down, though, the story clarifies that that was not the king's message: 

The comments were initially taken as a criticism of Sweden’s controversial anti-lockdown strategy, but the royal court later said the king was referring 'to the whole of Sweden and the whole society. He is showing empathy for all those affected.' 

I am glad The Guardian clarified that point, though it is a pity that clarification did not make it into the headline. 'Tis a pity, as well, that Guardian reporters do not read the articles in their paper.

Sweden did have obvious failures, and the king deserves credit for acknowledging them. The most glaring were the failure early on to shield senior citizens (particularly those in care homes) and immigrants, two groups that suffered disproportionately. That has little if anything to do with lockdowns, though, as the same failures occurred in countries that did close down. So much for his majesty's comments. 

O'Brien's article, on the other hand, makes several criticisms that need a deeper dive. So let me turn to those, giving his points followed by my responses.  

Recent days have seen Sweden’s Nordic neighbours Finland and Norway offering emergency medical assistance as Stockholm’s hospitals have been overwhelmed, infections and deaths have spiked dramatically upward, and the King of Sweden has made an unprecedented criticism of the government’s bungled strategy.

None of which is an argument for Sweden bungling into a lockdown strategy strategy instead. It would be if the European countries that locked down had managed to avoid a second wave, or at least had  less deaths from it; but neither of those are the case. Infections and deaths have been "spiking" since November all over Europe, and barring a vaccine miracle they will continue to do so until spring. In the process, one locked-down country after another has been recording a worse outcome, in terms of deaths per capita, than Sweden. None of which matters to O'Brien, who recycles just one cherry-picked comparison (that I last saw reused by Dominic Lawson in a recent Sunday Times): 

Unprecedented, but hardly surprising: Sweden has suffered a death rate that is roughly ten times that of neighbouring Norway and nine times that of Finland. 

As with Lawson, O'Brien makes no attempt to look for reasons to explain the difference; the reader is left to infer that those countries' lower death rates must be due to lockdowns (although neither Norway nor Finland had a fall lockdown, and Norway arguably had no spring lockdown, either). O'Brien also makes no attempt to deal with, explain, or even mention the larger European context.

At the beginning of autumn, Sweden had the fifth highest death rate per capita in Europe, behind only Belgium, Italy, the UK, and Spain; all of the last four had suffered more deaths while the country was locked down. By November, Sweden had fallen from #5 to #10, being passed in deaths per capita by France, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Montenegro, and Czechia. In the following months it has since slipped further to #15, being overtaken in the body count by Bulgaria, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, and Switzerland. Switzerland has lockdowns on the state level only; the other 13 have all relied on national lockdowns, most of them at least twice.    

Graph courtesy CTV News

   

A searing government report concluded the state had failed to protect the vulnerable. Mats Persson, a former UK government adviser, said of his home country: 'For a social model largely designed around the state levelling the odds and caring for the vulnerable, this will leave a very difficult moral legacy.'

Yes, Sweden's biggest failure came in care homes, which were locked down (just as they were in Britain and elsewhere) with disastrous results. Perhaps the UK government and its 'advisers' should take the beams out of their own eyes before preaching 'morality' to countries with less deaths. 

O'Brien does seem aware that Sweden has had less deaths than the UK, though he never mentions it, as he comes up with a couple of reasons why he thinks that should be. 

To understand the magnitude of what’s gone wrong, it’s worth noting that Sweden started the pandemic with several huge advantages. First, it’s a far less urban nation than the UK, for example, and the virus spreads much more rapidly in dense, built-up areas. While the UK has 273 people per square kilometre, Sweden has just 25.

Perhaps O'Brien is not being misleading, but has simply been misled from seeing that "25" figure (as I have) out of context on the internet. In any case the figure is misleading, as Sweden's population is not spread out more or less uniformly across the whole country but concentrated in a few urban areas.  Norrland, which covers more than half the country, is almost uninhabited, with less than 5 people per square kilometre. On the other hand, the population density in urban areas, where most of the people live, is more than 200 times greater. Wikipedia, the likely original source for O'Brien's "25" figure, puts it in context by noting that "87% of the population live in urban areas, which cover 1.5% of the entire land area." That works out to an urban density of just over 1,330 people per square kilometre; but Wikipedia gives an even higher figure for the whole settled area: "The average population density is just over 25 people per km2 (65 per square mile), with 1,437 persons per km2 in localities (continuous settlement with at least 200 inhabitants)." 

Second, Sweden has the highest rate of people living alone in the world: 42.5 per cent of households are single people, compared to just 29.9 per cent in the UK. Obviously, it’s much easier for the virus to spread within the home, and places with large, multigenerational households suffer most.

This statistic, that also appeared in Lawson, is not wrong but is not relevant either. The places in Sweden where infections occurred most were care homes, then hospitals, and then new immigrants' households (which tend to be larger and more intergenerational than the national average). None of those could conceivably have been prevented by closing restaurants and bookstores. Confining the non-essential to their households by lockdown might have even boosted household deaths among the last group. 

O'Brien then compares Britain with an imaginary Britain – another comparison used by Lawson, and a favorite one for lockdown aficionados – which he combines with his earlier comparison into a logical pretzel:    

To form an idea of the consequences that would have followed if the UK had followed the Swedish model, you would need to compare Sweden’s outcomes to its similar neighbours. Given the country’s death rate is ten times higher, imagine the chaos we’d have seen if we had multiplied the UK death rate by a factor of ten.

This is not a sound argument, but a non sequitur. I suppose the best way to show the non-sequitur is to substitute terms: 

"To form an idea of the consequences that would have followed if Sweden had followed the British model, you would need to compare the UK's outcomes to its neighbors. Given the UK’s death rate is more than 2.5 times that of its neighbor Ireland, more than 3 times that of its neighbors the Channel Islands, and 4 times that of its neighbor the Isle of Man, imagine the chaos the Swedes would have seen if they had multiplied their death rate by a factor of 2.5 to 4." 

Nor has there been an economic upside for Sweden: in fact, they saw a bigger hit to their economy than their neighbours, as well as much worse health outcomes. 

O'Brien is relying on economic data from August, not to mention from a notorious Sweden-bashing site. In October, Danske Bank forecast that Sweden's economy would fall 3.3% in 2020 (versus 3.6% for Norway, 4.5% for Finland, and 8.3% for the locked-down euro zone).   In November, SEB Bank estimated Sweden's GDP hit at 3.1% (versus 1.9% for Norway, 4.0% for Finland, and 7.6% for the euro zone). In any case, actually calculating economic damage will require more than just looking at short-term changes in GDP, but also looking at things like bankruptcies, unemployment, crime, and suicide. The countries that locked down will be totting up the damage for years. 

Swedish virologist Lena Einhorn concluded: “Sweden’s strategy has proven to be a dramatic failure.” This matters, not only because health and lives are in danger, but also because the Swedish experiment reveals the failures of the underlying theories of Covid-sceptics. 

The Swedish experiment of mitigation has to date resulted in less loss of life than the British experiment of continual interventions, roughly 20% less. Sweden has had more confirmed cases – over 4% of the population versus 3.5% – but it is unclear what that means in terms of health outcomes, other than a lower case fatality rate. Pace Dr. Einhorn, there is no actual evidence here of failure; cases that result in recoveries rather than deaths are not failures.  

Sweden’s controversial state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell predicted in the summer that because the country had a high rate of infection in the spring, it would have “a high level of immunity and the number of cases [in the winter] will probably be quite low”.

We now know he was disastrously wrong. But he wasn’t alone; his theory was exactly the same as that still relied upon by the UK’s Covid-sceptics.

Tegnell admitted he was wrong about that prediction a month ago. It is a stretch to call that wrong prediction a "failure" – it was not a failure of the theory, but a matter of not having adequate data – and jumping the shark to call it "disastrous." (If O'Brien's is implying that Sweden did not prepare for a second wave, that implication is false.) Sweden's consequences to date have been less "disastrous" than Britain's, or those of 14 other European countries that have had lockdowns. Of course, there are also European countries that have locked down and had less deaths as well; but the 14 counterexamples to date are reason enough to not attribute the latter countries' fewer deaths to their lockdowns.  

Sunetra Gupta, a lead author of the “Great Barrington Declaration”, promised in May that, in the UK, “the epidemic has largely come and is on its way out in this country… due to the build-up of immunity”. One leading Covid-sceptic, Michael Yeadon, wrote that thanks to “prior immunity”, “the pandemic is effectively over.”

It’s these same failed theories that still lead Covid-sceptics to argue it is safe to let the virus rip 

What exactly are "Covid-sceptics"? Does O'Brien mean "lockdown sceptics", as in his title, or "Covid deniers"? If the latter, he is attacking a strawman, and a rather dimwitted one at that: someone who doubted there was a virus would have a hard time believing that a person could develop antibodies specific to it. If the former, O'Brien is still wrong. The sceptic case against lockdowns is that their economic damage has been underestimated, while their value in saving lives has not been demonstrated. All that "immunity" adds to the discussion, for me, is the observation that the coronavirus does not "rip" (a word that sounds like what a Covid Cultist would say); on the contrary, community outbreaks can be expected to slow down with the buildup of immunity as people in the community catch it and recover. 

and attempt to shelter the old and vulnerable. 

Those are the groups that have taken the most casualties. Anyone who is serious about reducing deaths from Covid-19 should be concerned with trying to shield them; even politicians who locked down their states have paid lip service to the concept. I do not see any reason for that to be controversial at all.  

One baffling feature of 2020 was that so much energy was wasted puffing up Sweden, while countries such as Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand revealed to us genuinely successful models based on hard suppression of the virus with decisive action: all suffered a fraction of the European average rate of coronavirus cases.

Fine; let us briefly look those countries. All but Japan are effectively small, isolated islands (South Korea's only land border is impassable), which were able to eliminate the virus by using what I've called a 'NIMBY strategy': quarantining everyone entering the country and the relatively few cases found or traced in the community. Iceland (followed by Norway, and Finland) used the same strategy successfully in Europe. In no case was a lockdown needed (although Australia and New Zealand did have a couple, possibly for the political theatre). It is hard to see how that strategy could be made to work in the European Union. I do not think anyone has yet figured out exactly what Japan did, but we do know that it has not included wholesale lockdowns or business shutdowns either. 

There is, of course, no scope for triumphalism here. 

Of course not; nor any grounds for it, either. If Sweden does end up with far more deaths than any of the locked-down countries - say, the 66,000 that Imperial College estimated would have happened by May without NPIs - that would be something for lockdown champions to gloat about. But Sweden sitting in the middle of a pack of lockdown countries, the latter all markedly different in their mortality rates (by as much as 0.2% of the whole population) does not even indicate a correlation between locking down and reducing deaths. 

Things can always change. The pandemic looks likely to continue until spring; Sweden could always have an even greater winter surge, followed by overwhelmed hospitals and mass deaths. On the other hand, that can happen in any of the locked-down countries as well. One can only wait and see. I am sure this is not the last time I will be writing about the subject. 

'Cancel culture' moves into science

In defence of Karol Sikora | Spiked Online - Brendan O'Neill:

January 2, 2021 - "It isn’t only Covid-19 that is mutating. So is cancel culture. This nasty strain of censorship is spreading, intensifying, becoming ever-more poisonous and harmful to the body politic. The more coronavirus spreads, the more the virus of cancellation spreads too, with packs of censors and neo-Stalinists now demanding the silencing and punishment of anybody who deviates even slightly from the consensus on Covid-19. Just consider the current efforts to destroy the reputation of Karol Sikora.

"Professor Sikora is the cancer expert who has been questioning the Covid consensus for the past few months. He has queried the need for harsh lockdowns and kicked up a necessary fuss over the NHS’s suspension of various forms of medical treatment, including for cancer. In the fog of fear about Covid-19, Sikora has shone a light of hope. We’ll get through it, he says. Don’t live in dread, he counsels. Let normal life, and normal medical treatment, continue as much as possible, he’s advised. Has he always been right? Of course not. Show me the man who has. He suggested there wouldn’t be a second wave. In May he said that, come August, things will be ‘virtually back to normal’. That was wrong....

"For the supposed crime of not being entirely right about the course coronavirus would take, Professor Sikora is now public enemy No.1 in the eyes of the lockdown fanatics. Leading the mob, as is so often the case these days, is Guardian columnist Owen Jones. From the very start of the Covid crisis, Mr Jones, like many other privileged millennial leftists, has relished the authoritarianism of the lockdown. In March he expressed delight at being ‘placed under house arrest along with millions of people under a police state by a right-wing Tory government’. Yes, if you are well-off, middle class, capable of working from home and cancer-free, lockdown was probably a riot. For other people, however, it wasn’t. Professor Sikora’s chief sin was to express this truth – to say that lockdown will exact a wicked toll on many people – and now privileged beneficiaries of lockdown like Mr Jones are out to destroy him for it. 

"Jones’ complaint about Sikora is that he has been wrong about some things and he has criticised the policy of lockdown. ['What matters is that he dissents from the medical consensus on how the virus should be defeated'] He takes aim at Sikora’s proposal that instead of locking down the entire population, we should pursue shielding measures for certain sections of the population – ‘the old and vulnerable’. He mocks Sikora for being too chirpy. ‘The Positive Professor.’.... But most notably, letting slip his illiberal tendencies, Jones doesn’t merely criticise Sikora – that would be fine; everyone must have the right to criticise everybody else. No, he also suggests that Sikora should be denied the oxygen of publicity. The media outlets who give Sikora a platform should be ashamed of themselves, he says. They are ‘helping to spread disinformation’ and that is dangerous during a pandemic....

"Jones is not alone in the war on Sikora. The right-wing authoritarian Sam Bowman has branded Sikora and other sceptics, including Sunetra Gupta, a professor of epidemiology at Oxford University who supports the Great Barrington Declaration, as ‘cranks’. Bowman, senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute, detests these people’s suggestion that we should try to shield vulnerable people in the name of preserving liberty. He is far more keen on China’s approach to Covid, which, let’s not forget, involved literally locking people in their homes and silencing sceptical doctors.... Elsewhere, Sikora has been censured by YouTube and is regularly subjected to insults and accusations that he is killing people.

"We are now in full-on witch-hunt territory. Sikora, Gupta, Carl Heneghan, also of Oxford, and others are now routinely demonised....  The witch-hunters have helped to unleash hysterical abuse against sceptics. Gupta says she regularly receives emails calling her evil and dangerous. She has even wondered: ‘Would I have been treated like this if I were a white man?’ Of course, identitarians who normally stand up for women from ethnic minorities who are being trolled and harassed have nothing whatsoever to say about the war of words against Gupta, because to them she is scum. Well, she’s critical of the lockdown, so she must be, right?

"This is the chilling climate that the lockdown dogmatists have helped to create: one in which it is now tantamount to a speechcrime to raise a peep of criticism of the strategy of lockdown. Big Tech will censure you, mobs will hound you, neo-Stalinists will demand that you be added to a blacklist – for make no mistake, that is what the likes of Jones are essentially calling for when they suggest Sikora and others should not be ‘platformed’.... 

"We must defend freedom of speech in this crisis. Our lives are locked down – and many people accept that as a temporary measure – but our minds should never be locked down. Free thought and free speech are the great guards – our only guards, in fact – against the ossification of public debate and the creation of new, potentially damaging orthodoxies and policies. If we allow free thinking to die alongside the economy, millions of people’s jobs and those cancer patients who were neglected for months on end, then society will be the poorer for a very, very long time. So carry on, Positive Professor. Dissent is now the duty of every individual who wants to ensure that freedom is still breathing when this cursed lockdown is lifted."

Read more: https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/02/in-defence-of-karol-sikora/

Canada's poor & elderly hit hardest by lockdowns

Canada's COVID-19 strategy is an assault on the working class | Toronto Sun - Martin Kulldorff & Sunetra Gupta:

November 23, 2020 - "The Canadian COVID-19 lockdown strategy is the worst assault on the working class in many decades. Low-risk college students and young professionals are protected; such as lawyers, government employees, journalists, and scientists who can work from home; while older high-risk working-class people must work, risking their lives generating the population immunity that will eventually help protect everyone. This is backwards, leading to many unnecessary deaths from both COVID-19 and other diseases.

"While anyone can get infected, a key feature of COVID-19 is that there is more than a thousand-fold difference in the risk of death between the oldest and the youngest. In fact, children have much less risk from COVID-19 than from the annual influenza. Considering this, we must do a much better job protecting the elderly and other high-risk groups until a vaccine is available. As a contrast, children should go to school in-person while we encourage young adults to live near normal lives to minimize the collateral damage from the pandemic. For them, the public health damage from lockdowns is worse than their minimal risk from COVID-19. 

"Following basic public health principles and numerous pandemic preparedness plans, this is a focused protection strategy, as outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration, with accompanying details on how to properly protect the elderly....

"Despite heroic efforts by the public, the nine-month lockdown and contact tracing strategy has tragically failed older Canadians, with 97% of COVID-19 deaths inflicting those over 60. Where it did 'succeed' was in shifting the COVID-19 burden from affluent professionals to the less affluent working class. For example, in Toronto, the incidence rates were the same at the beginning of the pandemic, but after the March 23 lockdowns, detected cases declined in affluent neighborhoods while they skyrocketed in less affluent areas. A similar effect was subsequently observed for mortality....

"While it is impossible to protect anyone 100% during a pandemic, the notion that we cannot better protect the elderly and other high-risk groups is nonsense. It is not harder to protect the old than it is to protect the affluent, and the former leads to fewer deaths.

"Lockdowns have generated enormous collateral damage on other health outcomes, such as plummeting childhood vaccination rates, worst cardiovascular disease outcomes, less cancer screening, and deteriorating mental health, just to name a few. Even if all lockdowns are lifted tomorrow, this is something that we will have to live with – and die with – for many years to come.

"One of the basic principles of public health is to consider all health outcomes, and not only a single disease. Having thrown that principle out the window, we urgently need to bring it back to minimize mortality and to maximize overall health and well-being."

Read more: https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/opinion-canadas-covid-19-strategy-is-an-assault-on-the-working-class

Lockdowns and libertarianism (1)

by George J. Dance

In October, just as in March, a wave of coronavirus swept through Europe, followed predictably by a new wave of media and public panic leading to lockdowns. One by one, like dominoes, democratic governments in Europe – Ireland, Czechia, Spain, Poland, Italy, France, Germany, and finally the UK –fell to the latter wave, with only a few  (notably Norway and Sweden)  managing to resist being swept under by it. 

Unlike March, though, when the voice of panic was all that one heard, this time some dissenting voices managed to make themselves heard as well. This time, even the mainstream media has had to take note of: 

an increasingly heated [public] debate between two unlikely groupings of scientists, columnists, campaigners and politicians.
On one side there are the lockdowners. They think the only hope of triumphing over Covid-19 is shutdowns to bring numbers of cases back under control. Pubs and restaurants may have to close and households once again may be told not to mix.
On the other are the libertarians. They say we cannot return to those days because it would trigger an economic collapse and allow thousands of untreated cases of cancer, heart ailments and other diseases to mount. Tens of thousands might die, they say. (stress added).

"Each side points to different nations that have had greater success than Britain in fighting Covid-19, albeit with very different policies," the news story continues. "Each has attracted its own set of cheerleaders, politicians and journalists, as well as scientists who have also adopted strong contrasting stances." Some of the scientists have even produced duelling manifestos: for the libertarians, the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), which advocates for "allow[ing] those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally;" for the lockdowners the John Snow Memorandum, which calls that very idea "a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence." 

Some people dislike those terms. On the lockdowner side, for instance, economist Tyler Cowen insists that "the emphasis on lockdowns is a strawman," on the grounds that current U.S. lockdowns "are not severe," with relatively few activities on the prohibited list (though he quickly adds that "that list should be expanded"). On the libertarian side, epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta (a co-author of GBD) objects that her politics are Left-leaning, and that she disagrees with libertarians "about the distribution of wealth, about the importance of the Welfare State, about the need for publicly owned utilities and government investment in nationalised industries." 

Since Prof. Gupta has been vilified as a "right wing libertarian extremist" (and even a minion of Charles Koch), one must emphasize the point she is making. Many if not most lockdown opponents are not  libertarians on other issues, and philosophically many are not libertarians at all. (Perhaps 'Covid libertarians' would be a better term.) Still, the key recommendation of GBD – "Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal" while "People who are more at risk may participate if they wish" – is the libertarian position on lockdowns, and its supporters (like it or not) are libertarians on this particular issue. 

Libertarians believe in individual human rights, which limit what any person or group (including a government) may do to a person. Though 'liberty' gets most of the attention, those human rights include rights to life, liberty, and property. Calling those 'rights' simply means that harming another's life (by killing, maiming, or raping), liberty (by enslaving or confining) or property (by taking or vandalizing) is a wrongful act that should be prohibited. 

Lockdowns involve various measures to restrict people's movements and actions: by preventing them crossing a city or state boundary, or travelling only a few miles, or even leaving their own homes; from using the public streets or sidewalks; from working or shopping, by closing businesses; and from meeting with small groups of people (in the extreme case, from meeting with any people). All of those measures are compulsory mandates, enforced by coercion  – by the police power. They violate rights to property (ask the bankrupt businessmen) and liberty (our normal rights to work, travel, shop, dine out, visit friends)  – and, as GBD emphasizes, they do not respect our right to life, either. Lockdowns kill.

Libertarians cannot reject lockdowns merely because they are coercive, though, because libertarians do not reject coercion per se. Almost all libertarians (pacifists being the major exception) would allow coercion to prevent people from violating others' rights; which justifies some use of police power in a pandemic. As libertarian philosophy professor Jeffrey Huemer (quoted by Amitai Etzioni in the National Interest) puts it, "“Preventing the spread of infectious disease is within the legitimate functions of the minimal state, which most libertarians accept.” 

Some libertarians try to argue in good faith from that position to lockdowns. A typical argument goes like something like this: 

1. Governments may use coercion to stop any person from violating another person's rights.
2. For person A to give another person B a potentially deadly disease is a violation of person B's right to life. 
3. Therefore, a government may use coercion to prevent person A from giving Covid-19 to person B.

The argument is sound. But it is not an argument for lockdowns. It is an argument for quarantining someone who is known to be (or at least can be reasonably suspected of) giving others Covid; that is, for quarantining the contagious. Quarantine is a power that can be misused; but as per the above argument a libertarian can accept that there is a police power to quarantine. Like all government powers, it should be used as a last resort, if consent cannot be procured, and the quarantined person should have full procedural rights (to testing and a medical examination, for instance). 

The argument's conclusion, though, cannot be stretched into an argument for 'quarantining' the entire 'non-essential' population, because most of that population is not contagious. As many as 90% of Americans have never had Covid-19. 60% of those who have had the disease no longer have it. And 90% of those who do test positive for it play virtually no role in spreading it. None of these people poses a danger to anyone's right to life. The comparative few who do pose a danger, on the other hand, can just as easily be among the 'essential,' still active in the community, as among the segregated 'non-essential.' As uses of the police power to quarantine, lockdowns are both overly broad – as they are used to coerce contagious and non-contagious, innocent and culpable, alike – and also not broad enough, as they fail to quarantine all the culpable. 

Another libertarian philosophy professor quoted by Etzioni, Dan Moller, argues that "What's weird about a pandemic is that our everyday behavior suddenly puts others at risk  – just showing up to work can have huge negative externalities. So libertarians see restrictions on individual liberty in a pandemic as akin to restrictions on pollution." It is instructive to examine the analogy. Governments can and will restrict a known polluter, if they have clear evidence that the company is polluting, and that the pollution is harming someone's health (and therefore violating that person's right to life). They have never claimed the power to shut down all the 'non-essential' businesses, on the grounds that some of them are polluting and they cannot tell which ones are and which ones are not. Yet that is the power being claimed to justify lockdowns.    

Etzioni also quotes the old libertarian chestnut, "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins," variants of which he tells us were famously said by Abraham Lincoln, John Stuart Mill, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (The above quote is Lincoln's version.) That is indeed a good libertarian statement, which draws the boundary between competing rights quite well. But, once again, it is not a statement that justifies lockdowns. The latter would be something like: 

In order to save noses, everyone must be handcuffed in the back so they cannot swing their fists (except, of course, when we think it is essential that you be allowed to swing your fist). What, you don't want to wear the handcuffs? Why do you want to give your Granny a bloody nose?

Now, that sounds like what a lockdowner would say. As for me, though, I'll stick with how Lincoln and Mill put it. 

Also read: Lockdowns and libertarianism (2)

The trolling of Professor Gupta

A contagion of hatred and hysteria: Oxford epidemiologist PROFESSOR SUNETRA GUPTA tells how she has been intimidated and shamed for backing shielding instead of lockdown | Daily Mail - Sunetra Gupta:

October 30, 2020 - "Lockdown is a blunt, indiscriminate policy that forces the poorest and most vulnerable people to bear the brunt of the fight against coronavirus. As an infectious diseases epidemiologist, I believe there has to be a better way. That is why, earlier this month, with two other international scientists, I co-authored a proposal for an alternative approach — one that shields those most at risk while enabling the rest of the population to resume their ordinary lives to some extent.

"I expected debate and disagreement about our ideas, published as the Great Barrington Declaration. As a scientist, I would welcome that. After all, science progresses through its ideas and counter-ideas. But I was utterly unprepared for the onslaught of insults, personal criticism, intimidation and threats that met our proposal. The level of vitriol and hostility, not just from members of the public online but from journalists and academics, has horrified me....

"I am not a politician.... I am first and foremost a scientist.... Of course, I do have deeply held political ideals — ones that I would describe as inherently Left-wing.... I have strong views about the distribution of wealth, about the importance of the Welfare State, about the need for publicly owned utilities and government investment in nationalised industries. But Covid-19 is not a political phenomenon. It is a public health issue — indeed, it is one so serious that the response to it has already led to a humanitarian crisis. So I have been aghast to see a political rift open up, with outright abuse meted out to those who, like me, question the orthodoxy.

"At the heart of our proposal is the recognition that mass lockdowns cause enormous damage. We are already seeing how current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. Such pitfalls of national lockdowns must not be ignored, especially when it is the working class and younger members of society who carry the heaviest burden. I was also deeply concerned that lockdowns only delay the inevitable spread of the virus. Indeed, we believe that a better way forward would be to target protective measures at specific vulnerable groups, such as the elderly in care homes....

"I am certainly not pretending I have all the answers, but these issues need to be discussed and thrashed out thoroughly. That is why I have found it so frustrating how, in recent weeks, proponents of lockdown policies have seemed intent on shutting down debate rather than promoting reasoned discussion....

"I was left stunned after being invited on to a mid-morning radio programme recently, only for a producer to warn me minutes before we went on air that I was not to mention the Great Barrington Declaration. The producer repeated the warning and indicated that this was an instruction from a senior broadcasting executive.... A few days later, another national radio station approached my office to set up an interview, then withdrew the invitation. They felt, on reflection, that giving airtime to me would ‘not be in the national interest’.....

"On social media, meanwhile, much of the discourse has lacked any decorum whatsoever. I have all but stopped using Twitter, but I am aware that a number of academics have taken to using it to make personal attacks on my character, while my work is dismissed as ‘pseudo- science’. Depressingly, our critics have also taken to ridiculing the Great Barrington Declaration as ‘fringe’ and ‘dangerous’. But ‘fringe’ is a ridiculous word, implying that only mainstream science matters. If that were the case, science would stagnate. And dismissing us as ‘dangerous’ is equally unhelpful, not least because it is an inflammatory, emotional term charged with implications of irresponsibility. When it is hurled around by people with influence, it becomes toxic. But this pandemic is an international crisis. To shut down the discussion with abuse and smears — that is truly dangerous.

"Yet of all the criticisms flung at us, the one I find most upsetting is the accusation that we are indulging in ‘policy-based evidence-making’ — in other words, drumming up facts to fit our ideological agenda. And that ideology, according to some, is one of Right-wing libertarian extremism. According to Wikipedia, for instance, the Great Barrington Declaration was funded by a Right-wing think-tank with links to climate-change deniers. It should be obvious to anyone that writing a short proposal and posting it on a website requires no great financing. But let me spell it out, since, apparently, I have to: I did not accept payment to co-author the Great Barrington Declaration....

"[T]he abuse continues to flood in, increasingly of a personal nature. [H]owever ... there is now a groundswell of movements — Us For Them, PanData19 and The Price of Panic, to name but three — seeking to give a voice to those, like me, who believe that the collateral damage of lockdown can be worse than the virus itself. On Thursday, a broad coalition was launched under the banner of Recovery. Drawing people from across the mainstream of political views, the movement is calling for balance and moderation in our response to Covid-19, backed by a proper public debate and a comprehensive public inquiry.

"I am delighted that it has received such a level of support. For, ultimately, lockdown is a luxury of the affluent; something that can be afforded only in wealthy countries — and even then, only by the better-off households in those countries. One way to go about shifting our perspective would be to catalogue all the ways in which lockdowns across the world are damaging societies. At present, I am collaborating with a number of colleagues to do just this, under the banner www.collateralglobal.org. For the simple truth is that Covid-19 will not just go away if we continue to impose enough meaningless restrictions on ourselves. And the longer we fail to recognise this, the worse will be the permanent economic damage — the brunt of which, again, will be borne by the disadvantaged and the young."

Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8899277/Professor-Sunetra-Gupta-reveals-crisis-ruthlessly-weaponised.html

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/

Clear thinking and confusion on COVID immunity

by George J. Dance

A neighborhood in Queen's, New York – ironically named Corona – may have become the first place in North America to achieve herd immunity to the coronavirua. Serological testing in New York during the summer found that 68% of the population had antibodies to the disease. If the virus spreads at an initial reproduction number (Ro) of 3 (the most common estimate), it would require 66.67% of a population to have it in order to achieve herd immunity, the point at which community transmission stops. (At an Ro of 2.5, the herd immunity threshhold would be 60%.) 

That makes Corona a very safe place to be in terms of COVID. Not completely safe, of course, as residents can still catch the disease elsewhere and bring it in; herd immunity will not prevent them from infecting anyone, only from restarting a local epidemic. The average of those with antibodies in New York is under 25%, far too low for that. And community transmission is ongoing, with the state experiencing an average 800-1,000 new cases, and 5-10 new deaths, every day. Still, the epidemic is over in New York: the virus is still spreading, and still killing, but now as a normal disease; the spread is endemic rather than an epidemic. For now the state, as its governor likes to brag, has somehow "tamed the beast." The only question is: How?    

Some religious people might say: Because we prayed, and God heard our prayers. A believer in the Church of Lockdown would say: Because the government locked us down. Both claims are similar, but the latter purports to be a scientific claim, meaning that it must be falsifiable; believers in lockdown must do more than just state the claim, but give some evidence for it besides the two events (the lockdown, and the drop in cases months later). At minimum, they have to deal with alternate hypotheses that explain the events better. 

In April, Israeli mathematician Isaac Ben-Israel analyzed the pandemic data, and noticed that outbreaks of the epidemic followed the same pattern: peaking in six weeks, then withering away after eight. Whether a atate locked down or not made virtually no difference. Therefore, he concluded, lockdown were ineffective. However, Ben-Israel, not being an epidemiologiat or virologist, had no explanation; he could only point to the numbers.

Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt, who reached the same conclusion from the same data, noticed that the withering coincided with what he called 'saturation of infection' – a point when ~20% of the population (a figure he took from the Diamond Princess data) was no longer susceptible. Long before that point, while epidemics were still growing, their rates of growth had begun declining, an indication that the buildup of immunity was already slowing transmission. 

Others who looked at real-world data began to find the same dramatic drop at a similar infection ratio occurring around the world, from New York to Stockholm to Manaus, Brazil, to Shenzen, China.  Scientists have different theories why. One hypothesis, based on the theories of renowned epidemiologiat Sunetra Gupta, is that that there is pre-existing cross-immunity from other coronaviruas infections - enough, hypothetically, to achieve herd immunity at a lower level. Such cross-immunity may well exist, but not at that high an extent; for in none of the above communities (except possibly Shenzen) has the virus been eliminated, as herd immunity theory predicts. What has been eliminated is the epidemic, and with it most of the danger; but, as noted people are still dying of (or with) COVID in both New York and Stockholm. 

Another theory, to which I am partial, starts from the notion that "the herd" is a false analogy. Unlike a herd, where interaction is relatively the same for all, human interaction takes many different forms, within specific, limited social networks. Some people play key roles in such networks; they are more likely to get the disease, and more likely to spread it when contagious, but also more likely to block network transmission once recovered and immune. On this theory, a much lower number (~40%) of recovered patients is needed to reach "herd immunity" (at which point the disease is eliminated), while a much lower number than that would be enough to reduce the reproduction number R to ~1 (at which point the disease still spreads, but does not grow). Even some coronaviruas modellers have taken both theories seriously enough to model their assumptions, and use them to predict the pandemic's course.  

How do true believers in lockdown address the network theory, which also explains what happened in New York (and in Manauas and Stockholm, which the lockdown theory does not explain)? They don't. Rather, they first confuse the idea with the classical one of herd immunity – and, second, accuse the person who mentioned immunity of wanting more deaths simply to achieve herd immunity quicker. That was constantly done to Anders Tegnell in Sweden,  and also to Patrick Vallance in Britain, back when Britain had a no-lockdown policy. A speaker has only to mention 'immunity,' and a lockdown zealot will start ranting about 'herd immunity' instead.           

Another example occurs in this exchange between pandemic czar Antony Fauci and libertarian GOP Congressman Rand Paul. Fauci claims the epidemic ended in in New York because "they are looking at the guidelines that we have put together in the task force"; Paul points out that there is another possible explanation ("they've developed enough community immunity that they're no longer having the pandemic, because they have enough immunity"); and Fauci tries to shoot the idea down with this strawman: "If you believe that 22% is herd immunity, I believe you're alone in that." 

Paul seems to be thinking of Gupta's theory of cross-immunity, not the network theory. Still, he was clearly talking about building up a high enough degree of immunity (he says 'enough' twice) to lower the disease to New York levels, not reaching the herd immunity threshhold needed to eliminate it. Fauci either did not understand Paul's objection, or chose to misrepresent it.  

Why do they do that? Do they believe that the only possible level of immunity is herd immunity, or are they deliberately misrepresenting? Either may be possible – all that is known is that they consider the idea of 'immunity' evil, and are more concerned with eliminating it down than even considering it. It is also clear where they got that last idea; from the Bible of the Church of Lockdown, Tomas Pueyo's online writings, where the idea of immunity is discussed (not as a scientific theory, but as outright advocacy of more death:

The idea is that all the people who are infected and then recover are now immune to the virus. This is at the core of this strategy: 'Look, I know it’s going to be hard for some time, but once we’re done and a few million people die, the rest of us will be immune to it, so this virus will stop spreading and we’ll say goodbye to the coronavirus. Better do it at once and be done with it, because our alternative is to do social distancing for up to a year and risk having this peak happen later anyways.' (Tomas Pueyo, "The Hammer and the Dance")

To the best of my knowledge, no one else has ever said the sentences that Pueyo quotes.(I have searched). No one has to, as long as Pueyo's millions of readers are convinced it is what lockdown sceptics really believe down inside. The important thing then becomes not to logically answer sceptics, but to expose their evil intent. Fortunately, there are cracks in the monolith; despite everything lockdown advocates can do to suppress it, immunity theory seems here to stay.