Free Republic

On Oct. 4, 2020, with Prof. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). Our purpose was to express our grave concerns over the inadequate protection of the vulnerable and the devastating harms of the lockdown pandemic policy adopted by much of the world; We proposed an alternative strategy of focused protection. The key scientific fact on which the GBD was based—a more than thousand-fold higher risk of death for the old compared to the young—meant that better protection of the old would minimize COVID deaths. At the same time, opening schools and lifting lockdowns would...

This is one of those threads that need very little commentary EXCEPT if you’re a reader who hasn’t heard of the Great Barrington Declaration. Basically, the declaration says instead of lockdowns and other mitigation (masking, mandates, forced vaccination) during a pandemic we should work to protect the vulnerable while the young and healthy get back to normal.

The emails show Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins attempting to coordinate a 'devastating takedown' of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD)AIER, a libertarian think tank, sponsored the GBD, which largely abandons lockdowns in favor of herd immunity strategy that allows life to return to normal In an October 8 email from Collins to Fauci, the head of the NIH calls the GBD the work of 'three fringe epidemiologists' that 'seems to be getting a lot of attention' Collins adds that 'there needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don't see anything like that online...

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford University Medical School, recently said that COVID-19 lockdowns are the "biggest public health mistake we've ever made...The harm to people is catastrophic." Several U.S. states have started to ease their COVID-19 restrictions over the past few weeks.. Bhattacharya, who made the comments during an interview with the Daily Clout, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a petition that calls for the end of COVID-19 lockdowns, claiming that they are "producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health." As of Monday, the Great Barrington Declaration has received signatures from over 13,000 medical and public...

Freaking out about ‘herd immunity’ looks like a smear campaign designed to prevent Americans, including the president, from hearing the scientific case against the lockdowns. Why is the press and officialdom suddenly shrieking about “herd immunity”? On Oct. 12, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said pursuing herd immunity is “unethical.” Within hours, most of the media broadcast the same message. It’s as though someone sent out a list of talking points. “Sweden’s experiment with herd immunity is unethical and undemocratic,” Australia’s ABC intoned, “and reveals an underlying political pathology.” According to Fortune, herd immunity against SARS-CoV2 is a...

The Great Barrington Declaration offers a way forward, but do most Americans have the courage to risk their sense of security to maintain enduring liberty?In an era in which every dubious decision is “due to COVID-19,” we hear policymakers repeating the same mantra: “If just one life is saved,” it’s worth relinquishing our freedoms, our sanity, and possibly our future. More often than not, this ethical dilemma is presented without mentioning the obvious trade-offs or long-term consequences.Imagine you’re an administrative dictator. If you could “save just one life” — or even thousands — by crippling the youth, vaporizing a million...

The Defense Department agency responsible for U.S. missile defense systems has requested $8.4 billion for fiscal year 2011, an increase of about a half billion dollars. The request comes after an announcement last September that the United States would move away from a ground-based missile defense system to defend against Iranian and North Korean threats, to a sea-based platform. “The budget supports continuous emphasis on development, testing, fielding, sustainment,” David Altwegg, the executive director of the Missile Defense Agency, told Pentagon reporters yesterday. “We have shifted our emphasis from the ground-based defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles to the regional threat,...

Key Findings --America’s support for a Missile Defense system continues at an extremely high level (88%), a 2 percentage point increase from 2008 and a 5 percentage point increase from 2007. More than 3 out of 4 adults, 77%, feel “strongly” about their support, also a 2 percentage point increase from 2008 and an 8 percentage point increase from 2007. Currently, support ranges from 82% in the West and 83% in the Northeast to 91% in the South and 94% in the North Central region of the U.S. Men and women are at the identical 88% support level. Republican support...