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It didn’t help that some of those clamoring loudest for school reopening, such as then-President Donald Trump, so clearly underestimated COVID’s risks. An underappreciated reason why the October 2020 “Great Barrington Declaration” calling for an end to lockdowns generated such an allergic reaction in public health circles is that two of its three authors, Bhattacharya and University of Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta – who in May 2020 argued that COVID “has largely come and is on its way out” in the U.K., with a fatality rate between 0.1% and 0.01% – had been so spectacularly wrong in their early risk assessments. These were not people who had earned a lot of credibility on COVID.

Was a surprise! They found a way to blame Trump.