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Jay Bhattacharya “coauthored an article for the Wall Street Journal questioning the validity of the scary 2 to 4 percent fatality rate that the early models like Neil Ferguson’s were estimating – and that were causing governments to panic. He believed (correctly, as it turns out), that the true fatality rate was much lower.”

I'm guessing there are still real scientists in the world - and they tend to get things right. But this pandemic information was passed to celebrity "scientists" - and they're the same folks who freaked about global cooling, global warming, peak oil, ozone hole, population bomb etc etc etc. And THEY made it a freak out and caused the panic.

Ok, now I'm going to go back and finish readying the article to find out the actual answer.

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.