Fact-checking the Great Barrington Declaration

Deirdre Taylor’s Nov. 2 letter challenged me and readers to look at – and fact-check – the Great Barrington Declaration (at gbdeclaration.org). I did that and here is what I found.  Basically, the main authors are clearly not anti-vaccine or anti-mask (by word search), but they are pro-“focused protection” and anti-mandate and anti-lockdown. The “signing” of the declaration by more than “850,000 medical and public health scientists” seems a stretch since the graphic implies some 90 percent of signatories are in the USA, and that amounts to basically almost every provider that is out there. This number is contradicted by many other polls I have seen that said the majority of providers are “for” almost all anti-COVID strategies (exceptions: untested, rumor-based suggestions from social networks and quacks). Robots and pranksters could have entered many names, too, since the signup at the website could be done without verification of signer’s identity (I know of other cases where this has happened). Wikipedia also has an entry for “Great Barrington Declaration” and it also criticises the declaration, as well as discusses and names more of the fake names on the signatory list and points out that many had listed professional jobs far distant from medical areas. 

A search on the string “factcheck great barrington declaration” brought up links to many articles that were critical of, listed shortcomings of, and told counter-stories about the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). One link was to an article dated Oct. 9, 2020, titled “Herd immunity letter signed by fake experts including, eg. ‘Dr. Johnny Bananas,’”  at The Guardian website. The Guardian cited Sky News as doing the name check but I could not find when I visited the GBD website any signatory names other than the main guys.

One link from the list of critics took me to the article titled, “JAMA promotes the false equivalence of ‘focused protection [the GBD theme]’.” This was on the sciencebased-medicine.org website and I read all of it. Before you wave your victory flag because of the GBD website, read the article at the sciencebasedmedicine website. That article also alleged that GBD was said to be promoted by the libertarian American Institute of Economic Research, and Dr. Bhattacharya - a major contributor to the GBD website - was also alleged to have been a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution. So, now we have one of our two feet going out of the science bucket and into the politics bucket.

Getting back to Taylor’s letter, the general content is, as in a prior letter by her, more about being anti-goverment than “what is the optimum response to the COVID pandemic.” Getting back to the two other letters by Sarabeth Matilsky and Michele Baranow, I have no magic, guaranteed, or warranted answers. I am fully Pfizer vaxxed, boosted, Sanofi-Pasteur flu boosted, and also I wear my mask when inside other places away from home. I cannot deny anyone their right to an opinion, but the next steps I see look more like taking the other foot out of the science bucket and putting it into the “freedom” bucket, and that ends us up with even less appreciation for the science and more attention to fanatical dogma. One thing about the “freedom” bucket is that it allows for “freedom” without a specification for acceptable but otherwise preventable deaths and preventable, expensive, unpleasant, and inconveniencing hospital visits where many will come out with “long COVID” which is likely to be lifetime incurable. Some feet in that “freedom” bucket are now starting to go into the “noisy, disruptive, protest, divisive, shutdown” bucket where dialogue stops and real trouble - such as further amplification of anger, emotions, and violence - starts. But, if you get COVID and it kills you, or makes you seriously sick for a long time, that will put a serious crunch on your freedom, too.