A select group of scientists, economists and journalists was invited to a private event earlier this month, in the Massachusetts resort town of Great Barrington. The meeting, from October 1 to 4 2020, was organised by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think-tank, to help achieve a consensus on the best way to respond to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. After the end of proceedings, on October 4, epidemiologists and public health scientists signed a short statement, the so-called “Great Barrington Declaration”, which was then issued the following day. The three main signatories were Professors Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford University), Sunetra Gupta (Oxford University), and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard Medical School), all vocal critics of the widely adopted lockdown strategies meant to control the pandemic. Following the signing, the three jetted off to Washington DC to meet up with Dr Scott Atlas, White House coronavirus adviser, and Alex Azar, US secretary for health and human services, on October 5, signifying the Trump administration’s apparent support for their stated position.
The Declaration has since been signed online by several thousands of people from around the world and from a variety of backgrounds, both scientists as well as members of the general public, some allegedly using fake identities and improbable names. It has been widely cited in the most positive terms by right-wing commentators and has been viewed as a sign of a major rift in the scientific world when it comes to Covid-19. At the same time, the Declaration has also been predictably criticised by scientists who subscribe to the more widely accepted measures on handling the coronavirus, as well as by the centrist and left-wing sections of the media.
So, what’s all the fuss about? The backers of the Declaration vehemently oppose lockdowns, citing untold damage to the economy, both to low-paid working-class people who cannot work from home and to poor people in developing countries who cannot self-isolate, in addition to “collateral damage” to a wider public, in the form of lower rates of cancer screening and childhood vaccination, worsening outcomes from cardiovascular disease, increases in domestic violence, and increased suicide deaths. But these detrimental effects of lockdown are not a matter for dispute in themselves, being widely accepted by people of all persuasions to as being the inevitable consequences of the mass lockdowns of entire populations.
What is a matter for contention is the proposed solution. The signatories of the Declaration advocate a targeted “risk-based” approach-“Focused Protection”- in place of stricter lockdown measures that uniformly apply to everyone. The rationale is to isolate, or “shield”, higher-risk people, such as those aged 65 and over, at home or in nursing home, in an “age-stratified” approach that has been likened to “age-based apartheid” by NHS CEO Sir Simon Stevens. At the same time, younger people are urged to return to normal activities and continue living life to the full. These younger people can apparently afford to get infected, either remaining asymptomatic or developing mild symptoms at worst, and thereby help establish herd immunity within the community at a relatively low cost to life and to the economy. This is primarily because young people seldom develop severe infections, with some unfortunate exceptions.
The Declaration reads more like a statement of values, providing many reasons for opening up the economy, rather than as a scientific document backed by proven fact . Much is made of herd immunity, which when it comes to Covid-19 remains largely an unproven concept. The problem is, it isn’t clear whether sufficient numbers of people who get infected with Covid-19 go on to develop sustained immunity, as measured by a significant level of protective antibodies in the blood. In fact, some people are now even being diagnosed with re-infections, having recovered from a first encounter with the coronavirus. Secondly, there is no consensus about what proportion of people need to become immune for the entire community to develop herd immunity, with quoted figures ranging from 40 per cent to 80 per cent of the population. Even in Sweden, the land of lovers of “freedom”, herd immunity has yet to be confirmed by actual community testing. But then, some scientists such as Gupta also contend, in their support, that many people are likely to be already immune to Covid-19 without requiring to have formed antibodies in their bloodstream. This can be shown by the ability of their body’s T-cells to attack the virus and also by the likelihood of cross-immunity to Covid-19 as a result of previous infections with other coronaviruses.
The fact is, no one has a monopoly on the truth. We are dealing with a new virus. Our knowledge is growing but is still far from complete. It doesn’t help that two major lines of diametrically opposed thought are emerging, divided along libertarian and liberal viewpoints respectively. All we can conclude from the Great Barrington Declaration is that there is a wide and deepening ideological gap when it comes to our response to Covid-19, and that things are unlikely to improve in the near future.
Ashis Banerjee