From left: Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya at the American Institute for Economic Research, Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons / American Institute for Economic Research / Taleed Brown

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.
NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, October 20th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.
MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next, the WORLD History Book.
It was five years ago now when governments put nations into lockdown in response to Covid. A handful of experts spoke out against that and other policies.
Here’s WORLD’s Emma Eicher with the story.
NEWSNATION: New tonight: a group of more than 40 epidemiologists and public health scientists from around the world say they reject closing economies to slow the spread of COVID and they’re calling the idea, “The Great Barrington Declaration.”
EMMA EICHER: October 4th, 2020, eight months into the COVID-19 pandemic. Three epidemiologists gather in Massachusetts to discuss the harm the lockdowns might have on the population, and they propose a solution.
There, they host a press conference with just a few journalists in attendance. One of the epidemiologists, Sunetra Gupta, says lockdowns don’t take all of public health into consideration.
Audio here from the American Institute for Economic Research.
AUDIO SUNETRA GUPTA: It doesn’t seem to be a sustainable strategy, and it doesn’t seem to be one that recognizes that there are other things to consider in implementing any kind of control strategy, which is, what is it going to do to the rest of the population?
The three authors—Gupta, Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya—have extensive backgrounds studying infectious diseases … and they teach at universities like Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford.
Kulldorff, also a biostatistician, organized that October meeting.
MARTIN KULLDORFF: We decided, very spontaneously, to write a one page declaration, and then we call it the Great Barrington Declaration, because we were meeting in Great Barrington, which is in the Berkshires, in Western Massachusetts.
Together the authors represented a wide spectrum of knowledge in medicine, vaccine development, and health policy. And the document’s co-signers included reputable medical practitioners ranging from England to India.
Kulldorff says that meant people couldn’t ignore the Declaration’s proposal.
KULLDORFF: And it sort of spread like a wildfire, and a lot of people signed the Declaration, both among scientists, like tens of thousands of scientists and medical professionals, as well as hundreds of thousands among the public. I think it reached almost a million signatures.
The Declaration said that shutting everyone inside their homes and closing schools was a recipe for disaster. Instead, the declaration advocated for herd immunity… where healthy people would resume their daily lives to build up an immunity to the coronavirus.
Those who were vulnerable to disease would be protected until scientists developed a vaccine.
The idea was called, “Focused Protection.”
Audio from a 2020 UnHerd interview with Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of the declaration and a public health policy expert.
UNHERD JAY BHATTACHARYA: Herd immunity is not a strategy. Herd immunity is a fact about most infectious diseases, the course that they spread through the population … it’s less of a strategy than a recognition of a biological fact.
But other medical experts were skeptical. Critics accused the Declaration of not laying out thorough guidelines, saying it advocated for “doing nothing” in the face of a deadly pandemic.
Former Chief Medical Advisor to the United States Anthony Fauci went as far as calling the Declaration “nonsense” —saying it was dangerous to follow its proposal. Here’s Fauci in a 2020 interview with JAMA Network.
JAMA ANTHONY FAUCI: But how are you going to protect the people in society who have diabetes, obesity, hypertension, lung disease … you just gonna let them get infected? We get to herd immunity from a vaccine, not by letting everybody get infected.
But the Declaration did have guidelines for vulnerable populations to protect themselves from the disease, such as minimizing staff rotation at nursing homes.
Bhattacharya said many critics seemed to gloss over that part.
UNHERD JAY BHATTACHARYA: The premise is not to do something reckless. The premise is to take account of all of public health, all of the harms.
Some embraced the Declaration’s practical solution to the pandemic. Martin Kulldorff says people recognized that children were the least susceptible to the disease, and it made sense for them to go back to school.
KULLDORFF: It was the public who stopped these lockdown measures. It made it untenable for politicians to continue with the lockdowns, because the public was smarter than the scientific establishment, because the public was living all the harms.
One Western country put Focused Protection into practice. Sweden. It kept their schools open and lockdowns at bay. At the time, Swedish officials were fiercely criticized for their more liberal approach.
But five years later, Sweden reported much fewer deaths from the coronavirus. They also maintained steady test scores in schools, while other countries saw a downturn after the lockdowns.
Kulldorff says he feels vindicated.
KULLDORFF: Doing the Focused Protection, as advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration and implemented in Sweden was the right thing. And yes, the fact that among Western countries, Sweden has the lowest all-across mortality is the ultimate proof of that.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, Kulldorff says public trust in health systems has fallen. Part of this is due to the push for vaccines, which may have helped an aging population. But forcing it on healthy people with prior immunity made no scientific sense and put many at needless risk of vaccine related injuries.
KULLDORFF: Both the public health community and the scientific community is now in dire straits because they have lost integrity and trust among the public. And that's easy to lose in one pandemic, but it will take at least a generation to build back that.
Kulldorff is optimistic that we might learn from our mistakes in the future.
KULLDORFF: But I think that the next generation will learn the lessons from this pandemic. My belief and my hope is that they will do a lot better than we did this time.
That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Emma Eicher.
WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.
Please wait while we load the latest comments...
Comments
Please register, subscribe, or log in to comment on this article.