To: maceng2 who wrote (1446132 ) 3/12/2024 7:19:02 PM From: Eric Read Replies (2) | Respond to Total KoolAid:Great Barrington Declaration From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Great Barrington Declaration was an open letter published in October 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns . [1] [2] It claimed harmful COVID-19 lockdowns could be avoided via the fringe notion of "focused protection", by which those most at risk could purportedly be kept safe while society otherwise took no steps to prevent infection. [3] [4] [5] The envisaged result was herd immunity within three months, as SARS-CoV-2 swept through the population. [1] [2] [4] Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford , Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University , and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University , it was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial . [6] [7] [8] The declaration was drafted in Great Barrington, Massachusetts , signed there on 4 October 2020, and published on 5 October. [2] [9] At the time, COVID-19 vaccines were considered to be months away from general availability. [4] The document presumed that the disease burden of mass infection could be tolerated, that any infection would confer long term sterilizing immunity, and it made no mention of physical distancing , masks , contact tracing , [10] or long COVID , which has left patients with debilitating symptoms months after the initial infection. [11] [12] World Health Organization (WHO) and numerous academic and public-health bodies have stated that the strategy is dangerous and lacks a sound scientific basis. [13] [14] Background and content American Institute for Economic Research (AIER). [18] Gupta, one of the authors, said that given journals’ reluctance to publish on herd immunity and that the authors had been "repeatedly dismissed as fringe or pseudoscience" an open letter was chosen as the publication route out of necessity. [1] preventive healthcare . [19] They propose reducing these harms by ending mandatory restrictions on most activities for most people. Without these restrictions, more people will develop COVID-19. They believe that these infections will produce herd immunity (the idea that when enough people become immune, then the virus will stop circulating widely), which will eventually make it less likely that high-risk people will be exposed to the virus. [19] [19] Stanford epidemiologist Yvonne Maldonado said that 40% of Americans have an elevated risk of dying from COVID-19, so this would require keeping the 40% of people with known risk factors away from the 60% of people without known risk factors. [20] In practice, such shielding is impossible to achieve. [3] [9] but likewise were being restricted elsewhere; for instance the UK saw quarantines of students, travel advisories, restrictions on meeting other people, and partial closures of schools, pubs and restaurants. [21] [9] For instance, it does not mention testing any people outside of nursing homes, contact tracing , wearing masks , or social distancing . [9] It mentions multi-generational households but does not provide any information about how, for example, low-risk people can get infected without putting high-risk members of their household at risk of dying. [9] [10] en.wikipedia.org
