Great Barrington Declaration

[rainbow]

In early October, 2020, three epidemiologists convened in Great Barrington, a small town in Massachusetts, USA. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford University Medical School, Stanford, CA, USA), Sunetra Gupta (University of Oxford University, Oxford, UK) and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA) were there to draft an argument for a new strategy to combat COVID-19. They called it the Great Barrington Declaration.

Don't this lot look like a bunch of twats now?

Kuldorff and colleagues reckon a focused protection approach would lead to herd immunity some time between 3 and 6 months, after which the vulnerable could return to normal life. Walensky retorts that the herd immunity point has not been established, nor is it clear how stable this immunity would be. She noted that the 11 million infections and 250 000 deaths from COVID-19 that have been documented in the USA only constitute a small fraction of the total population. “I am not willing to stand behind a policy that leads to 10 or 15 times more deaths”, said Walensky. She would prefer to wait for herd immunity to be conferred by a vaccine. Most experts believe the earliest this could happen would be the second half of 2021. The debate over what to do in the interim looks set to continue.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanr ... 5/fulltext

[NineBerry]

Letting the virus run wild isn't such a great idea. There's a a higher chance of mutations that could allow the virus to spread more easily or even develop immune escapes so that previously infected people could get infected more easily and the effect of vaccines could be reduced.

Or maybe this has already happened

[Brian Peacock]

Someone will be along shortly to pitch TGBD as a small band of plucky scientific sceptics challenging the institutional behemoth of scientific orthodoxy, such that criticising the sceptics is tantamount to the surpression of uncomfortable ideas and a downgrading of free speech rights etc etc.

[rainbow]

Letting the virus run wild isn't such a great idea. There's a a higher chance of mutations that could allow the virus to spread more easily or even develop immune escapes so that previously infected people could get infected more easily and the effect of vaccines could be reduced.

Or maybe this has already happened

I think it had some effect on policy, at that stage early October the number of new infections appeared to be stable and quite low (compared to now). Business was returning to normal in the UK and many European countries. Schools were back from summer recess.

Six weeks later we were seeing a return to lockdown measures. Am I connecting dots that weren't there?

Didn't they consider the possibility that variants would appear and that herd immunity may not be as simple as they had guessed (Wot you said)?

[Hermit]

Someone will be along shortly to pitch TGBD as a small band of plucky scientific sceptics challenging the institutional behemoth of scientific orthodoxy, such that criticising the sceptics is tantamount to the surpression of uncomfortable ideas and a downgrading of free speech rights etc etc.

All done in December. After a few isolated posts about the Great Barrington Declaration here, here, here and here, it was discussed at length, starting here.

I think it may be worthwhile moving the relevant posts out of the Coronavirus thread and into this one.

[Brian Peacock]

I think your links will suffice.

[rainbow]

Someone will be along shortly to pitch TGBD as a small band of plucky scientific sceptics challenging the institutional behemoth of scientific orthodoxy, such that criticising the sceptics is tantamount to the surpression of uncomfortable ideas and a downgrading of free speech rights etc etc.

All done in December. After a few isolated posts about the Great Barrington Declaration here, here, here and here, it was discussed at length, starting here.

I think it may be worthwhile moving the relevant posts out of the Coronavirus thread and into this one.

Agree with you, and now we have the benefit of hindsight as some might say.

[rainbow]

Points of inflection, perhaps?

[Brian Peacock]

Source?

[rainbow]

Source?

Made it up myself.

[Brian Peacock]

Saucy.

[Hermit]

Source?

Made it up myself.

Well, the arrows anyway. You screen-grabbed the chart from this page.

[rainbow]

Source?

Made it up myself.

Well, the arrows anyway. You screen-grabbed the chart from this page.

Yes, I did. Bad me for not referencing the data.

[Hermit]

Source?

Made it up myself.

Well, the arrows anyway. You screen-grabbed the chart from this page.

Yes, I did. Bad me for not referencing the data.

'Tis a trifling matter. Of far greater importance is to note once again that Dutch data are the best UK data.

[rainbow]

As humans we often find patterns where there are none. Was I doing this, or is my conspiracy theory valid?