Great Barrington Declaration
The Great Barrington Declaration is an open letter published in October 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns. It claimed that COVID-19 lockdowns could be avoided via the fringe notion of "focused protection", by which those most at risk of dying from an infection could purportedly be kept safe while society otherwise took no steps to prevent infection. The envisaged result was herd immunity as SARS-CoV-2 swept through the population.
Signed by 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, a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial. The declaration was drafted in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, signed there on 4 October 2020, and published on 5 October. At the time, COVID-19 vaccines were considered to be months away from general availability. 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, or long COVID, which has left patients with debilitating symptoms months after the initial infection.
The World Health Organization and numerous academic and public-health bodies stated that the strategy would be dangerous and lacked a sound scientific basis. They said that it would be challenging to shield all those who are medically vulnerable, leading to a large number of avoidable deaths among both older people and younger people with pre-existing health conditions, and warned that the long-term effects of COVID-19 were still not fully understood. Moreover, the WHO said that the herd immunity component of the proposed strategy is undermined by the unknown duration of post-infection immunity. They said that the more likely outcome would be recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination. The American Public Health Association and 13 other public-health groups in the United States warned in a joint open letter that the "Great Barrington Declaration is not grounded in science and is dangerous". The Great Barrington Declaration received support from the Donald Trump administration, British Conservative politicians, and from The Wall Street Journal editorial board.
Background and content
The idea to issue a declaration came from a conference run by the American Institute for Economic Research. 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.The declaration says that lockdowns have adverse effects on physical and mental health, for example, because people postpone preventive healthcare. The authors 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, which will eventually make it less likely that high-risk people will be exposed to the virus.
The authors say that, instead of protecting everyone, the focus should instead be on "shielding" those most at risk, with few mandatory restrictions placed on the remainder of the population. 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. In practice, such shielding is impossible to achieve.
The declaration names specific economic changes that the signatories favour: resuming "life as normal", with schools and universities open for in-person teaching and extracurricular activities, re-opening offices, restaurants, and other places of work, and resuming mass gatherings for cultural and athletic activities. By October 2020, many of these things had already happened in some parts of the world, 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.
The declaration does not provide practical details about who should be protected or how they can be protected. For instance, it does not mention testing any people outside of nursing homes, contact tracing, wearing masks, or social distancing. 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.
The declaration does not provide any references to published data that support the declaration's strategy.
Authors
is a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Oxford University Department of Zoology. Gupta has been a critic of early COVID-19 lockdown strategy, arguing that the cost is too high for the poorest in society, and expressing concern about the risk of widespread starvation in many countries because of lockdown-related disruptions in food supply chains. In 2020, Gupta led a group which in March released a widely criticized modelling study suggesting, in one of its scenarios, that half the population of the United Kingdom might already have been infected with COVID-19, and in September a preprint study which argued herd immunity thresholds might be lower than expected due to pre-existing immunity in the population. Rupert Beale of the Francis Crick Institute described the March preprint as "ridiculous" and "not even passed by peer review". Gupta was one author of a 21 September letter to the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, recommending shielding of vulnerable groups of people rather than the lockdown method of the British government response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the declaration's signatories, Gupta said: "We're saying, let's just do this for the three months that it takes for the pathogen to sweep through the population", arguing that the situation would only be temporary. Gupta has dismissed claims of having a right-wing perspective, claiming to be "more Left than Labour".Jay Bhattacharya is the director of the National Institutes of Health and a former professor of medicine at Stanford University whose research focused on the economics of health care. Before he co-authored the declaration, Bhattacharya co-wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal titled "Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?", in which he claimed that there was little evidence to support shelter-in-place orders and quarantines of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, and was a lead author of a serology study released in April which suggested that as many as 80,000 residents of Santa Clara County, California might have already been infected with COVID-19. The study and conduct of the research drew wide criticism for statistical and methodological errors and apparent lack of disclosure of conflicts. The study was later revealed to have received undisclosed funding from JetBlue's founder David Neeleman, according to an anonymous whistle blower. Bhattacharya said that he received racist attacks and death threats during the pandemic, and he also claimed that "Big tech outlets like Facebook and Google" suppressed "our ideas, falsely deeming them 'misinformation'". He also said that "I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to 'let the virus rip', when I had proposed nothing of the sort." Bhattacharya argued that the declaration did not take "a contrarian position, but represents the standard way of dealing with respiratory virus pandemics that the world has followed for a century until 2020."
Martin Kulldorff was at the time a professor of medicine and a biostatistician at Harvard University. He had defended Sweden's response to the pandemic and, along with Bhattacharya, wrote a Wall Street Journal editorial arguing against testing the young and healthy for SARS-CoV-2. Kulldorff had previously claimed that people under 50 years old "should live their normal lives unless they have some known risk factor" while "anybody above 60, whether teacher or bus driver or janitor I think should not be working – if those in their 60s can't work from home they should be able to take a sabbatical for three, four or whatever months it takes before there is immunity in the community that will protect everybody." He did not provide a detailed explanation about what people between these ages should do. While Gupta has said in a promotional video that less vulnerable people should be allowed "to get out there and get infected and build up herd immunity", Kulldorff cautioned against deliberately seeking out infection; he said that "everybody should wash their hands and stay home when sick". Kulldorff disagreed with criticism that the plan would lead to more deaths, calling it "nonsense". He said "fewer older people – not zero, but fewer old people – would be infected. But you'll have more young people infected, and that's going to reduce the mortality." Kulldorff has discussed the Declaration on The Richie Allen Show, a radio programme that has previously featured antisemites and Holocaust deniers, although Kulldorff said he had no knowledge of the show prior to being invited on.
Since 2021, Bhattacharya, Kulldorff and Gupta have worked with Brownstone Institute, a think tank that has opposed COVID-19 masking and vaccine mandates. The institute was started in 2021 by Jeffrey Tucker, the AIER editorial director who helped organize the Great Barrington Declaration. It has described itself as the declaration's "spiritual child". Bhattacharya and Kulldorff were named senior scholars there. Gupta has been an author.