More Than 60,000 Doctors & Scientists Have Signed The Great Barrington Declaration
Despite extreme amounts of ridicule and attacks that seem to have been initiated by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his colleagues, The Great Barrington Declaration has accumulated a wealth of support since the beginning of the pandemic.
By Arjun Walia | The Pulse
The Great Barrington Declaration is a statement written in early 2020 that proposed a focused protection approach to handling COVID. It was written by Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine and epidemiologist at Harvard University, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor and epidemiologist at Oxford University and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician, epidemiologist and professor of medicine at Stanford University.
It also has an impressive list of co-signers that you can see on the home page that include some of the most renowned scientists in the world, along with nearly one million signatures from doctors, scientists, concerned citizens and healthcare workers.
As of today, the Great Barrington Declaration has 916,000 signatures, with more than 60,000 from public health & medical scientists, healthcare workers and doctors. The authors estimate that less than 1% of the signatures are fake.
From the very beginning of the pandemic, The Great Barrington Declaration has been criticized for their stance that a more focused protection approach should be taken instead of global lockdowns and vaccine mandates. This is because lockdowns have had a catastrophic impact on public health, may have killed more people than COVID itself, and are arguably one of the worst public health catastrophes in human history.
The declaration is also a proponent of the robust science that’s now emerged regarding the strength of natural immunity. Some of the world’s leading immunologists have criticized government health authorities for ignoring this fact.
One of the latest examples comes from Professor Ehud Qimron, head of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology. He wrote a letter to the Ministry of Health criticizing them for refusing to admit that recovery is more protective than a vaccine.
This begs the question, why hasn’t natural immunity been included in health policy? Natural herd immunity as a pandemic response has been condemned by most public health institutions and academics. Critics such as the World Health Organization (WHO) argue that the death toll from a herd immunity approach would be intolerable and overwhelm healthcare systems.
But is The Great Barrington Declaration advocating a ‘herd immunity strategy’?
According to them,
“No. Those making such claims in the media have either (i) not read the document, (ii) do not understand the basic principles of infectious disease epidemiology, or (iii) are wilfully distorting the public health message for political purposes. For COVID-19, all strategies lead to herd immunity, making it nonsensical to denote one specific approach as a herd immunity strategy just as it does not make sense for airplane pilots to talk about a “gravity strategy” for safely landing a plane. The Declaration advocates a strategy that minimizes mortality until herd immunity is reached. That is done by minimizing the number of older high-risk people in the group that get infected while maximizing them among those that are still uninfected when herd immunity arrives. “
This is not an “anti-vaccine” group. They simply state, if wisely used, COVID-19 vaccines are an important additional tool for focused protection. According to them, the key is to vaccinate older high-risk people as well as their caregivers, such as hospital and nursing home staff. They feel that those who have already had COVID-19 do not need to be vaccinated, which does align with the science.
It makes even more sense today, given the fact that vaccines do not prevent the transmission of the virus, and may be responsible for creating conditions that encourage the emergence of more variants. Vaccine injury reports are also significant, but have been pushed under the rug.
According to The Great Barrington Declaration
“The Great Barrington Declaration – As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.
Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people.
Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.
As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.” – The Great Barrington Declaration
The no lockdown, focused protection approach has been unfairly attacked by government affiliated health scientists. Any suggestion, opinion, or science/evidence that calls into question the measures governments have taken to combat the virus has been heavily ignored and/or ridiculed.
A great example comes from newly released emails that show Dr. Anthony Fauci and his boss at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to conduct a “quick and devastating” take-down of health experts who proposed a lockdown-free COVID control strategy, specifically The Great Barrington Declaration.
When the leak came out, Bhattacharya stated in a tweet that now he knows “what it feels like to be the subject of a propaganda attack by my own government. Discussion and engagement would have been a better path.”
And this is exactly the point we have been making here for quite some time! The mainstream media still continues to fail to have appropriate discussions around controversial topics, and refuses to admit when they are wrong.
That being said, conversations are being had. Mainstream media is just not covering it, and as a result those whose only source of information is big media seem to have a one-sided and objectively inaccurate perspective about the pandemic.
This article (More Than 60,000 Doctors & Scientists Have Signed The Great Barrington Declaration) was originally published on The Pulse and is published under a Creative Commons license.