The World and Everything in It: October 20, 2025

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Can a state be sued twice—once for not using race and then again for using too much of it?

MOOPPAN: It's essentially being used as a reverse partisan gerrymander on purely racial grounds. And that is a Constitutional problem.

NICK EICHER, HOST: The future of the Voting Rights Act … ahead on Legal Docket.

Also today, the Monday Moneybeat …

And later the WORLD History Book … looking back on the COVID lockdowns and a heroic scientist who pushed back.

BHATTACHARYA: The premise is not to do something reckless. The premise is to take account of all of public health, all of the harms.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, October 20th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Time for the news. Here’s Kent Covington.

MARK MELLINGER, NEWS ANCHOR: Hamas fires on Israeli troops, Gaza aid suspended » A bloody weekend in Gaza put the Israeli-Hamas ceasefire to the test. But, despite the violence, the truce remains intact.

Hamas militants ambushed Israeli troops in southern Gaza early Sunday, killing two soldiers. In response, Israel launched air attacks targeting Hamas, killing dozens of Palestinians. Israel also temporarily suspended aid to Gaza.

Prior to the strikes, in an interview last week, President Trump said he expects Hamas to disarm, and implied the terror group will face action if it does not.

TRUMP: We’re going to find out. So it’s not a hard timeline, but it’s… it’s a line in my own mind. And at a certain point, if they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, uh, then we’ll have to do it for them.

Following the retaliatory strikes, Israel’s military says it resumed enforcing the ceasefire. It also says aid deliveries to Gaza are resuming Monday.

Vance will lead trip to Israel re: implementing Phase 2 of ceasefire » Meantime, Vice President J.D. Vance is expected to lead a U.S. delegation to Israel this week to discuss implementing Phase 2 of the Israeli-Hamas ceasefire.

White House Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will accompany Vance.

Phase 2 involves establishing new governance in Gaza and disarming Hamas.

But sticking points for moving on to a new phase remain. For instance, the Israeli government is frustrated Hamas has not yet kept its promise to return the bodies of all deceased hostages.

U.S. considers sending Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine » The U.S. is considering a major step to boost Ukraine in its efforts to fend off Russia’s now three-and-a-half-year-old invasion.

The White House is weighing the possibility of sending Ukraine long-range, deep strike-capacity Tomahawk missiles. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the mere threat of Kyiv getting the missiles may pressure Russian leader Vladimir Putin to finally get serious about negotiating an end to the war.

ZELENSKYY: Now, everybody knows now about Tomahawks. And Putin calls to President Trump. I think one of the reasons is because he’s afraid that [the] president will give us Tomahawks.

Zelenskyy on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday.

In a meeting with Zelenskyy Friday, President Trump refused to commit to providing the Tomahawks. He explained his hesitation to Fox NewsChannel’s Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.

TRUMP: We can’t give all of our weapons to Ukraine. We just can’t do that… You know, if we’re going to be short, I don’t want to do that. I can’t jeopardize the United States.

Trump is aggressively working to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. His next scheduled step is to meet with Putin in Hungary in the coming weeks.

Government shutdown shows no signs of ending » The U.S. government shutdown is now almost three weeks old, and it’s showing no signs of ending.

Democrats are demanding healthcare subsidies be extended in any deal to reopen the government. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries tells ABC’s This Week, Republicans won’t negotiate.

JEFFRIES: We have repeatedly made clear… that we want to sit down [and] find a bipartisan path forward to enacting a spending agreement that actually makes life better for the American people.

On the same broadcast, House Speaker Mike Johnson said the Democrats’ demands to restore funds cut earlier this year are a non-starter.

JOHNSON: They want to reinstate free healthcare paid for by taxpayers to illegal aliens… They want to give money back to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting… and they want to engage in all sorts of spending on foreign projects around the globe.

Republicans say they’re willing to negotiate with Democrats on soon-to-expire healthcare subsidies, but say lawmakers need to pass a spending bill to reopen the government first.

Former Rep. Santos now free after Trump commutation » The disgraced former Congressman George Santos is now a free man.

The New York Republican was just a few months into serving a more-than-seven-year federal prison sentence after pleading guilty to fraud and identity theft. But Friday, President Trump commuted his sentence, saying it was too harsh.

Santos tells Fox News:

SANTOS: I’ve made some poor choices in my life. But nothing would warrant [an] insane, arbitrary sentence. But on top of that, a sentence that no one else would have gotten, a treatment that no one else would have gotten.

Santos admitted to deceiving campaign donors and stealing the identities of 11 people, including members of his own family. He says he has a lot to prove to a lot of people, and insists he won’t disappoint President Trump.

Louvre jewels theft » Thieves managed to break into the world’s most-visited museum over the weekend and got away with priceless Napoleonic-era jewels, including tiaras, necklaces, and broaches.

The theft at the Louvre in Paris took only a few minutes to pull off and happened in broad daylight Sunday while the museum was open. Investigators say the thieves rode a basket lift up the Louvre’s facade, forced their way through a window, and smashed display cases.

Christopher Marinello of Art Recovery International says the thieves care about converting the stolen items into cash, not the pieces’ importance to cultural heritage, which means:

MARINELLO: There’s a race going on right now with the… French local police to recover these items before they get broken up, because they will melt down the precious metals, they will recut the stones, with no regard for the pieces’ integrity.

The thieves did fail to get away with one piece they were after. After the crime, French authorities found a crown belonging to Napoleon the Third’s wife and containing more than 1300 diamonds outside the museum. It had been broken.

I’m Mark Mellinger.

Straight ahead: Using race as a factor in drawing lines for voting districts, in today’s Legal Docket. Plus, looking back at the COVID lockdowns, and one scientist who pushed back… in today’s World History Book.

This is The World and Everything in It. 

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 20th day of October, 2025. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for Legal Docket.

For today, two recent oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court.

We begin with a case out of Louisiana that could reshape how states draw congressional districts. At issue is whether using race to draw a second majority-black district in Louisiana violates the Constitution.

REICHARD: A federal judge required that after ruling the earlier map containing just one majority-black district violated the Voting Rights Act. Specifically, Section 2, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting.

EICHER: But a group of non-black voters say this new map goes too far—because it explicitly sorts voters by race. They call it a racial gerrymander. And they argue that violates the 14th and 15th Amendments—ratified after the Civil War to protect the rights of Americans freed from slavery.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wondered just how long remedies based on race can last:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: …is there anything you can point us to that would not allow it to extend forever, the intentional use of race, which you acknowledged in response to Justice Gorsuch?

EICHER: The attorney for the black voters, Janai Nelson, pointed to Congress … saying that’s a political question and not one for the courts to address. Local conditions change … she argued … and lawmakers are best positioned to respond.

But we’re left with the question: what is the endpoint?

REICHARD: One amicus brief caught my eye, from the Pacific Legal Foundation. Lawyer Chris Kieser filed it in support of the non-black challengers to the second map.

He argues the constitutional issue here is that these are individual rights, not group rights.

CHRIS KIESER: The Equal Protection Clause and the Fifteenth Amendment are individual rights. They are concerned with have YOU been discriminated on the basis of your race. Now when we talk about group rights we’re talking about a system of proportional representation which actually Section 2 specifically says we’re not going to have that. But really when you get into the concept of group rights, you have to assume that groups have preferences, when really individuals are the ones who vote and individuals are the ones who have their rights protected by the 14th and 15th amendments. Groups don’t vote. Just because they’re a particular race, just like any other characteristic, that doesn’t mean they’re going to have particular politics. 

REICHARD: Returning to the argument before the court: Justice Samuel Alito pressed the lawyer for the black voters with a series of hypotheticals. He was trying to find out whether what’s being labeled as racial bloc voting … might actually be partisan politics.

JUSTICE ALITO: If registered Democrats overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates regardless of the candidate's race, is that bloc voting?

JANAI NELSON: If you're looking at it simply from a party perspective, no. We don't judge bloc voting based on party, we judge it based on race. Racially polarized voting is measuring racial performance and voting behavior.

ALITO: And likewise if registered Republicans overwhelmingly vote for Republican candidates, that’s not bloc voting?

NELSON: That’s not how we measure voting. We measure voting based on race for purposes of Section 2 because the Constitution forbids race discrimination in voting, not party discrimination.

ALITO: So, if it happens to be that people of one race or another race overwhelmingly prefer one of the political parties, does that transform the situation into racial voting, or is it still just partisan voting?

NELSON: No. You look at how different races of voters vote and whether they vote in a way that is polarized.

REICHARD: Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga pushed back. He argued there’s no way to separate race and party—and trying to do so amounts to racial stereotyping with no clear endpoint.

Justice Neil Gorsuch took it further … pressing the lawyer for the black voters: 

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Sometimes federal district courts order maps. And you're saying sometimes acceptable for a federal district court to order a map that intentionally discriminates on the basis of race?

NELSON: I—I—I disagree with that formulation… states and plaintiffs… cannot put forth maps that discriminate and that use race in—in excessive fashion.

EICHER: But what counts as “excessive”? Justice Department lawyer Hashim Mooppan put the shoe on the other foot:

HASHIM MOOPPAN: If you think there’s a problem here, white Democrats in West Virginia, they don't get districts drawn for them. White Democrats have zero representation in West Virginia, even though they're a significant percentage of the state.

The reason why Section 2 as be --as it's being construed …is a problem is it's saying that you have to create a district for Black Democrats that you would never create for white Democrats in a Republican state. It's essentially being used as a reverse partisan gerrymander on purely racial grounds. And that is a Constitutional problem.

EICHER: Even some of the liberal justices acknowledged how hard it is to separate race from politics. Listen to this exchange with the DOJ lawyer and Justice Sonia Sotomayor:

MOOPPAN: I agree they drew a very pretty rectangle. The problem is that in the very pretty rectangle, the Blacks lived in the south and the north. And they took two very different groups of Black people and put them together.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: —the problem is that all of this map is that way, north and south, east and west.

MOOPPAN: Right, but they did it for racial reasons, and the State did it for non-racial reasons.

….later….

SOTOMAYOR: If you can't separate out the two, it's impossible.

MOOPPAN: But you can separate out the two. You can control for party and you can require them to draw a map that meets the political objectives.

REICHARD: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson offered a striking analogy—comparing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Her point? That Congress can require fixes even when no one intended to discriminate—so long as inequality persists. But in making that comparison … Justice Jackson seemed to cast black voters not as political actors with agency, but as people needing special accommodation.

Here’s her exchange with John Greim, another lawyer for the non-black voters:

JUSTICE JACKSON: And it didn’t matter whether the person who built the building intended for them to be exclusionary. That’s irrelevant. Congress said the facilities have to be made equally open if readily possible.… The idea in Section 2 is that we are responding to current-day manifestations of past and present decisions that disadvantage minorities… So I don't understand why it matters whether or not the state intended to do that. SO….what Congress is saying is if it is happening… you've got to fix it.

GREIM: The difference is that the remedy under the ADA… is not stereotyping—

EICHER: Greim pushing back and arguing that unlike the ADA … voting rights law isn’t about modifying the environment to help the disadvantaged. It’s about avoiding racial stereotypes.
Justice Jackson conceded the point but not the premise. If there’s no remedy, what’s left to do?

And that’s the tension … and to critics, the tell: an admission that the Voting Rights Act is being interpreted not just as a shield against discrimination, but as a tool to engineer racial outcomes.

Chris Kieser, whom you heard from earlier, says Louisiana is now stuck in a double bind:

KIESER: Well, it puts the states in really an impossible position, because in this case, Louisiana lost a section two preliminary injunction in a previous case, and so that's why they drew this district,...And so they drew a map with a second majority black district, and then they got hit with a racial gerrymandering lawsuit. And so you can see that, you know, there's, like, very little play in the joints between the way that section two is interpreted and the way that the racial gerrymandering is interpreted under the 14th Amendment….it's a very fine line the states have to walk.

EICHER: The Court’s decision will clarify how far states can go to comply with the Voting Rights Act—without crossing into that unconstitutional racial sorting.

REICHARD: On to our last case, Bost v Illinois State Board of Elections. It’s about mail-in ballots, but not whether they’re good or bad.

The issue is who has the right to challenge them? In legal terms: who has standing to sue?

EICHER: Illinois allows ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted up to 14 days later. That’s been the rule since 2005. Congressman Mike Bost says that drags out the count and forces campaigns to keep staff on payroll just to monitor the results.

REICHARD: In order to show standing, Bost has to show a specific, personal injury—something directly caused by the 14-day rule and fixable by a court.

His lawyer, former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, argued that a financial hit is injury enough.

PAUL CLEMENT: …Illinois is counting unlawful ballots. Those unlawful ballots could cost Congressman Bost the election or at least reduce his margin of victory, and he has to pay his campaign staff for two extra weeks. All of that means that Congressman Bost has standing three times over.

REICHARD: But Justice Elena Kagan wasn’t convinced:

JUSTICE KAGAN: It’s not enough to just walk in and say, ‘Hi, I’m a candidate and I’m suing.’ But what you have to show some kind of substantial risk that the new rule puts you at an electoral disadvantage relative to the old rule, ….and say something, not a lot, but something to suggest that that’s right.

CLEMENT: So I could live with that rule. I don’t know that it’s the ideal rule….later….I actually would prefer a rule that says: No, Congressman Bost is coming in and he's saying there are going to be unlawful votes cast and they'll be ballots with his name on it in his election. That's enough, we’re done.

EICHER: Clement also argued the 14-day rule creates a competitive disadvantage. Meaning, late-arriving ballots can erode the margin from votes already counted—and potentially flip the outcome. That line of reasoning made two justices uneasy—worried that courts could end up playing political oddsmaker. First, Justice Gorsuch:

JUSTICE GORSUCH: If a probability of loss is required, what’s the number—50 percent? 60? Is there something unseemly about courts prognosticating about a candidate’s chances immediately before an election, in a way that might influence the election?

EICHER: Then Chief Justice John Roberts: 

JUSTICE ROBERTS: …what you’re sketching out for us is a potential disaster. ….if the candidate’s going to win by 65 percent, no standing. But if the candidate hopes to win by a dozen votes—and there are places where that happens over and over again, then he has standing. But we’re not going to know that until we get very close to the election, right? So it’s going to be in the middle—the most fraught time—for the Court to get involved in electoral politics.

REICHARD: On the other side, Illinois Solicitor General Jane Notz. She argued that extra staffing time is just an ordinary campaign expense. It’s not the kind of harm federal courts recognize as injury that would give someone standing.

Justice Kavanaugh foresaw courts flooded with election challenges after the fact. Here he is in an exchange with Justice Department lawyer Michael Talent in support of Bost:

KAVANAUGH: If there isn’t standing for these kinds of challenges to ballot-receipt deadlines for U.S. House elections and their standing pre-election … and they’re all forced post-election, what it looks like next November or December?....

P 62 ….’cause if we’re not thinking ahead to that, we’re going to walk into something.

MICHAEL TALENT: I can’t imagine it would be easy or good...

REICHARD: However the justices come down, it’ll affect dozens of other states that also count late-arriving mail ballots.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket! 

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: The Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s time now to talk business, markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bahnsen. David heads up the wealth management firm the Bahnsen Group, and he is here now. Good morning to you.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Well, good morning, Nick. Good to be with you.

EICHER: Well, David, as we talked last week, you have been unpacking a lot from that recent meeting with your team at the Bahnsen Group, and this week you’re writing about the AI revolution in your Dividend Cafe.

I’d like to read just a brief section from that to set this up:

“The fear at hand concerning AI is quite simple. Generative artificial intelligence can do so much that over time, it will severely diminish the need for human beings in various economic tasks—functions like data entry, customer service, content creation (and that one hits close to home), as well as administration and bookkeeping and financial modeling. These are most frequently cited as highly vulnerable to the improved efficiency that AI represents.”

So David, you’ve made the case, though, that fears of mass unemployment from AI are overblown. Why do you think that narrative has gained as much traction as it has?

BAHNSEN: Well, first of all, I want to be clear that I have made the point that net massive unemployment is overblown. And that’s different in the sense that it is entirely possible a lot of jobs are lost. But the question is: what jobs are lost that are not replaced? A net substantial increase in unemployment—because that’s very different than someone loses one job but gets another.

I think that where a lot of this hand-wringing comes from is incredibly common. As there is progress and evolution in technology and whatnot, there’s a lot of historical precedent. And I would be willing to say, even though I don’t say this kind of thing very often, that I can understand why—on top of this historical normalcy of fearing job loss from technological advancement—this is happening at a different speed than we’ve seen before. So it also causes people to believe that this time is different.

I make the historical argument that the Industrial Revolution eliminated a lot of jobs, and I actually believe that was more profound—the basic displacement of so much of the agricultural economy because of the ability of machines to do things that previously human hands did. That was a more substantial change in society than even this is. And yet, it more than doubled the net new jobs that came out of it.

But I think a lot of people can look to that data point. I make a similar point, by the way, about the digital revolution—what has happened since the advent of computers over the last 40 and 50 years. I think some people are willing to accept the historical case for how the Industrial Revolution and digital revolution did not decimate job holding for tens of millions of people in America—but then would say, “However, David, you’re wrong on this one,” that the AI moment strikes us as so profound and so different that a lot of the aforementioned sectors you brought up will unfortunately see total lack of employability within them.

This is where I believe that Christian anthropology becomes so important—a Christian understanding of the human person. And I also believe for Christians to understand some basic realities of economics that are themselves Biblical and rooted to our understanding of creation.

And I avoid hand-wringing here—and some of the same panic that many others have in this AI moment—because of those principles that I’m sure we’re going to get into.

EICHER: All right, so you’re optimistic long term, but what about that short-term pain—when jobs are lost before new ones are created? Does that not also create real dislocation? And is there anything that we can do to kind of prepare for that?

BAHNSEN: Well, I don’t know that anybody can predict that it will be very serious dislocation—partially because right now we’ve seen virtually none of it. The estimates from very serious private data analytics firms are that we’re talking about somewhere between 17,000 to 27,000 jobs that have been displaced because of AI year to date, in an economy with 160 million-plus people in the labor market.

So I do not believe that those numbers are going to hold. I think the numbers will go higher. But when we say something is going to get very serious, it’s important to note that we’re moving from describing a reality to predicting a reality. And these predictions are going to be filled with fallibility, so I’m a little cautious of the hubris that goes into some of the predictions.

But that is not to say that I disagree with being cautious and being preparatory, however one can get in front of this, Nick. Now, whether or not we’re going to is outside of my purview. But speaking to the listeners that WORLD has, and what I happen to believe ought to be done: it’s really important that we tell the truth about it—that we speak to mobility and dynamism and retraining and vocational flexibility as very, very important things—and not speak to nostalgia. That, no, you have a birthright to the thing you were trained in, and that public policy must be geared to protecting the horse and buggy, so to speak, to use the old Industrial Revolution analogy.

It’s not a moral point of view, but it’s also not anywhere near a social, political, or economic—let’s call it—coherent point of view, either.

And I have no choice here, Nick, but to probably make a few enemies along the way, because there’s a real misunderstanding about the difference—or where the line is—between sympathy and sensitivity and speaking hard truths.

There is only one thing to do. If the AI moment wasn’t happening, everything I just said still applies. There are moments in which one’s job becomes obsolete, and their need for continued employability requires them to adapt. And that’s the term we use—called dynamism.

That dynamic adaptability is either geographical or connected to their own skill sets—their training, their education, their preparation—and sometimes it can be both.

Christians need to be vigorously advocating for robust dynamism in this moment.

EICHER: All right. Well, let’s talk now about what cannot be replaced.

David, you’ve written about the importance of wisdom, judgment, and virtue—and these are things that AI cannot seemingly replicate. What you call the “really human” things. What does that mean, practically, in the AI moment?

BAHNSEN: Well, it means that there is a total dishonesty from many who have been pioneers and leaders in AI about what machines are doing and not doing—and where the human is necessary and not necessary.

But on a go-forward basis, there are decisions that are made when a lot of data comes that are then requiring this time-tested idea of implementing wisdom. You know, the Proverbs makes a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. The Proverbs talks about discernment.

I do not accept at any level that there will ever be a time in which wisdom comes from a machine and not from a human. Nor do I accept that there will ever be a time that wisdom is not needed in a specific amount of economic calculus.

Now, very quickly—counting how many widgets are on a shelf at a warehouse in Sheboygan, Wisconsin—that’s not a wisdom calculus. That’s knowledge or data collection. I think humans are not going to be as needed in doing some of that, and computers are going to do it quicker and better. But then making decisions around some of these things—that’s what I’m referring to.

To the extent certain things are done quicker and cheaper, it adds to labor productivity, which then adds to the ability for there to be production of more goods and more services.

This is the economic principle that pains me—that more Christians do not understand—that God made us, out of the Garden of Eden, with infinite needs and wants. And the way in which our needs and wants are satisfied is with this thing called work. And that work is a verb of production. The production of goods and services meets human needs and wants—or it dies. We cannot produce things that don’t meet human needs or wants sustainably.

I believe those needs and wants are so infinite that the ability to produce things is infinite. And the fallacy at play here is that because AI can do more work, that it means there’s less need for human work. And that fallacy is zero-sum—that it believes there’s a finite amount of work to be done. I think there’s an infinite amount of work to be done.

And in fact, 68 million net new jobs—net being the key word here—were created out of the computer moment. About 57 million of them are in various forms of services. All but 11 or 12 million. Those are a lot of jobs that didn’t ever exist before.

That greater efficiency, greater productivity, greater technological advancement created new opportunity. Sometimes it required new training, sometimes it didn’t. It could be a horizontal move. But that is what’s going to happen out of AI.

Will it happen quicker than it’s happened before? I think it might. It also might not happen as quick as some people think, too.

What I want to encourage Christians to do is have faith that the immutable laws of creation have not changed—and the human person has not changed. And out of that, we find vocational opportunity.

EICHER: All right, one quick last question. How do you think we should be preparing the next generation for an AI-shaped economy?

David, in other words, what should schools, parents—even churches—be doing differently to help young people thrive?

BAHSNEN: This needs to be an entire book. It needs to be an entire series of lectures. It needs to be elaborated on with much more than we have time and space to do now.

But at a very high level, Nick, I can’t say this enough to Christian educators K through 12, and certainly at higher education: your focus does not need to be in teaching people how to do vocational tasks that AI is about to do.

The focus needs to be on raising men and women to be people of virtue, to be people of wisdom, to be people of sound judgment. These are things that cannot be displaced by computers.

Now, higher education should have been doing this even apart from AI. This should have been the bigger priority in terms of the moral formation of capable men and women—but all the more so in the AI moment.

To go compete, we need to be rethinking how we train young people to be professional, vocational, employed adults. And I think that this is the starting point. But I acknowledge it requires a lot more elaboration.

EICHER: David Bahnsen, founder, managing partner and Chief Investment Officer at The Bahnsen Group. He writes regularly for WORLD Opinions, and at dividend-cafe.com. David, thanks so much. We’ll talk to you next time.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick.

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. 

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Tomorrow: the beige baby boom and the pushback against it. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

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