"Do something" is not science...
- Thread starter Willence
- Start date
You really think that makes your point for you? First of all he completely mischaracterized comments made by Trump which were idiotic on their own. There's really no need to change or alter them. Secondly Dr McKary was very clear on exactly what he was saying but they don't want to listen and they don't have an answer so instead they go to the Trump playbook. Again.
We botched COVID. We politicized it. We went at each other over it and left nothing but wreckage in our wake. There were a lot of doctors and experts that needed to be in the room talking about this that weren't. President Trump absolutely botched the beginning of this. He never should have trusted Fauci or Francis Collins. Massive mistake that cost a lot of lives. We need to make sure that that never happens again.
This is where I call you a POS because you deserve it. Hundreds of thousands of people died needlessly because of Trump pushing back against the scientists and downplaying the virus according to Dr Birx. I saw anecdotal evidence that confirmed this with many stories about people relaying their loved ones died because they listened to Trump. They refused to take any precautions because he said it was no big deal, it would go away in April, it was a Democratic hoax etc..
Then add in the hydroxywhatthe****, "try it, what do you have to lose?" the shining the light inside your body, the inject disinfectant bullshit and shit tons of other misinformation and Fauci had his hands full trying to push back against all the insanity of those days. How dare you blame him for the extra deaths when without his willingness to speak up, there could have been many more. You are pathetic!
Trump White House COVID-19 coordinator Deborah Birx says most deaths could have been avoided
The former White House COVID-19 coordinator said most coronavirus deaths after the first wave "could have been mitigated or decreased substantially."
www.usatoday.com
Kristin Urquiza, whose father died from Covid, condemns Trump in DNC speech
Urquiza said her father, Mark Anthony Urquiza, voted for Trump and listened to his efforts to downplay virus
This is where I call you a POS because you deserve it. Hundreds of thousands of people died needlessly because of Trump pushing back against the scientists and downplaying the virus according to Dr Birx. I saw anecdotal evidence that confirmed this with many stories about people relaying their loved ones died because they listened to Trump. They refused to take any precautions because he said it was no big deal, it would go away in April, it was a Democratic hoax etc..
Then add in the hydroxywhatthe****, "try it, what do you have to lose?" the shining the light inside your body, the inject disinfectant bullshit and shit tons of other misinformation and Fauci had his hands full trying to push back against all the insanity of those days. How dare you blame him for the extra deaths when without his willingness to speak up, there could have been many more. You are pathetic!
Trump White House COVID-19 coordinator Deborah Birx says most deaths could have been avoided
The former White House COVID-19 coordinator said most coronavirus deaths after the first wave "could have been mitigated or decreased substantially."www.usatoday.com
Kristin Urquiza, whose father died from Covid, condemns Trump in DNC speech
Urquiza said her father, Mark Anthony Urquiza, voted for Trump and listened to his efforts to downplay viruswww.theguardian.com
Wow. You do you man.
Some of the stuff Trump said was totally outlandish. To say he killed hundreds of thousands of people is flat insane. And also, people like Dr. Birx were wrong about more than they were right about. Time is shown that to be the case because this whole mess got politicized from the beginning by all sides. Kind of like candidates Biden and Harris saying they may not take a vaccine developed under Trump as though he were the one developing it. You do a lot of circumstantial reading of events which is to say you're just another part of the problem. I know I'll never change your mind so just have fun in your world.
Wow your damn self, how dare you blame the epidemioligist that had to suffer through that shitstorm instead of the guy who spun it up. Do you have a conscience?
And there you go lying again about what Harris and Biden said. Don't tell me your attacks aren't politically motivated when you don't give two shits about accuracy. Listen to her words and I'll wait for your apology!
OK. What would you say is missing that would make these examples, "small government". Please be specific in your answer.
I never lie. I do make mistakes though. I'm not invested in being right. I just want a good debate so I can learn from things I get wrong and things I don't know. Me being right isn't important and certainly lying about things makes my views not only wrong but tragically wrong. If the facts don't support something I believe, then I need to pull my head out of my ass and learn what is right. You should try it!
Biden, Seizing on Worries of a Rushed Vaccine, Warns Trump Can’t Be Trusted (Published 2020)
Thrusting the issue of a coronavirus vaccine to the center of the campaign, Joe Biden said he trusted vaccines, but not a politicized development process. His comments came as the president publicly rebuked the top federal scientist.
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Two things:Yes he is. I don't even like him or agree with his views on almost anything. The study that he referred to is what I am talking about.
Here are two separate links. One is to an article talking about the findings is in the other is to the actual findings themselves. Hopefully that will get you past your objection which was pointless when considering the actual data that we're discussing.
Approximately Zero
Masks make no difference in reducing the spread of Covid, according to an extensive new review.www.city-journal.org
1. The article explicitly states that a reason the mandates didn't work was because of people's inability to wear them correctly/wear the correct masks.
2. The study itself says "The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions."
So anyone coming out with a definitive answer and citing this study is purposefully misrepresenting the data concluded in the study.
Your first point makes the argument. It is a intricate process to put on a medically certified mask like doctors wear. People in the general public are not really capable of doing that and it's an extremely uncomfortable process wearing a mask like that for most people. It doesn't matter whether it's ill-fitting masks or the mask just not working. We were told that cloth masks were okay. There was just so much misleading information and information that was not accurate and people knew it. We can get into the semantics of it but the reality is the masking didn't have any effect and that's what's been documented. Would a correctly worn N95 mask help? Probably but that isn't what we were dealing with.
Ehh, it's not an intricate process. it's wearing it properly vs wearing it around your mouth and not your nose, wearing a dirty one and not replacing them as often as they should, etc. I'm not going to sit here and defend some of the suggestions that were thrown out by medical professionals/gov't officials early on during the pandemic to try and curb the spread. cloth masks clearly minimize water vapor being expelled during talking/breathing/etc, but they aren't great at preventing air transmission.
Especially with the size of the virus. It just went through those cloth masks. A properly fit mask needs to create the best "seal" possible with a person's face, chin, nose and cheeks. Without that, it's pretty much useless. The stuff we were wearing was never going to really do that. It created a false sense of security and that, in my opinion, was far more dangerous than anything else.
You "should" know better than this but you're being disingenuous again. That heavily edited video, taken out of context is proof you don't care about accuracy. Everyone knows what they meant - Trump was pressuring the FDA to approve the vaccine BEFORE the election and that's what they were referring to. They weren't going to take it if the FDA buckled to his pressure campaign before safety trials had completed.Biden, Seizing on Worries of a Rushed Vaccine, Warns Trump Can’t Be Trusted (Published 2020)
Thrusting the issue of a coronavirus vaccine to the center of the campaign, Joe Biden said he trusted vaccines, but not a politicized development process. His comments came as the president publicly rebuked the top federal scientist.www.nytimes.com
White House threatens FDA chief's job over vaccine approval
WASHINGTON (AP) — Hours before the Food and Drug Administration authorized the first COVD-19 vaccine late Friday, a high-ranking White House official told the agency’s chief he could face firing if the vaccine was not cleared by day’s end, two administration officials said...
apnews.com
Trump White House exerted pressure on FDA for Covid-19 emergency use authorizations, House report finds
The report by House Democrats examining the pandemic says Trump officials sought vaccine approvals to sway voters before the 2020 election.
www.politico.com
the CDC recommended cloth masks in March/April of 2020, and then changed that many months later after more data came out that showed COVID was an aerosol transmission (i think it was Oct/Nov of 2020). I'm not going to be upset with them about making a health suggestion with the information known at the time, and then changing that once more information became available. That's how the scientific process is supposed to work.
You "should" know better than this but you're being disingenuous again. That heavily edited video, taken out of context is proof you don't care about accuracy. Everyone knows what they meant - Trump was pressuring the FDA to approve the vaccine BEFORE the election and that's what they were referring to. They weren't going to take it if the FDA buckled to his pressure campaign before safety trials had completed.
White House threatens FDA chief's job over vaccine approval
WASHINGTON (AP) — Hours before the Food and Drug Administration authorized the first COVD-19 vaccine late Friday, a high-ranking White House official told the agency’s chief he could face firing if the vaccine was not cleared by day’s end, two administration officials said...
Trump White House exerted pressure on FDA for Covid-19 emergency use authorizations, House report finds
The report by House Democrats examining the pandemic says Trump officials sought vaccine approvals to sway voters before the 2020 election.
You're missing the part where I never said Trump was some savior or did a great job. I'm not exonerating Trump and blaming Biden. They are all clowns and all professional useless people in my book. The difference with us and you're trying to prove one side is good and the other is bad. If you'd just realize it's all bad stuff driven by bad people then you'd be getting there. I'm not even interested in defending Trump. He had those daily conferences and they were an utter disaster. He was 1000% the wrong person for that time in our country. He did do a good job backing the pursuit of a vaccine but that's where his credit ends. Never should have listened to just Fauci, Birx, Collins, etc. without bringing worldwide experts into the equation. Anything as big as COVID should not lack opinions and scrutiny.
Yes Willy, they told you that at the beginning purposefully so you would die. That's what they wanted to happen.
This is called deflection. You made false claims against Biden and Harris and I proved you wrong. Admit what you were trying to do.
OK. But, they also are proven to have been quashing other experts with opinions they didn't like. We didn't pull all the experts together to talk about what we could do to have a sound and well considered public policy toward COVID. A big part of this was the mask policy. Do you disagree with that assessment?
No, you didn't. I heard them say it myself. I was there. You're working along boundary lines as to WHY they said those things. That doesn't matter. All I said was they made statements undermining the credibility of the vaccines. If that was well founded or not is not something I opined on. I didn't take the vaccine. I was never going to because I did my own research and felt it was an unnecessary gamble. I am happy they were out there and I think Biden did a reasonably good job getting them dispersed though I was adamantly against any mandates which he just couldn't resist due to his massive authoritarian streak.
With government it's never purposeful. It's just incompetence. I would hit the character limit for one post if I started listing all the incompetent policies, actions, programs put forward by our government.
This is why I call you propaganda Willy. You will twist and distort everything until it fits your narrow, partisan worldview and then you hope the rubes will buy in. No one believes what you wrote here.
So we have a "novel" virus that we've never seen before, so epidemioligists default to the best practices that informed their prevention strategies from other viruses UNTIL they had a chance to learn more about this particular virus. Normal people understood that since there weren't enough medical grade masks available, they were giving the best advice they could. You intentionally misrepresent their recommendation so you could sling partisan mud, due to your brilliant 20/20 vision. You knew better than everybody all along.
What exactly do you think I am saying and what do you think I am twisting? You always say this but never really provide any detail on what you feel I am doing there.
Yes, it was novel which means something new. When something is new and terrifying and a threat to lives, would you discard or undermine the views of people who are recognized worldwide experts on public health and virology in order to maintain your power over public health? Or would you gather all the experts you could to try and gather all the information possible to make the best decision possible in order to save all the lives you can?
It's a demonstrable fact we did not do the latter and instead chose the former. A lot of that is probably revealed by the fact that NIH was funding some of this research in the lab where COVID started.
What's partisan about what I am saying? Please elaborate
Holy Eyeroll. Just stop man. You know you're trying to portray the people you don't like as the problem so you can win an ideological argument
PROPAGANDA
You have no idea what was done and what wasn’t. You weren’t there. But I bet you did stay at a holiday inn express last night.
They did say exactly what I stated. How's that ideological? Everything is politicized these days by all sides. Please list for me any issue that doesn't seem to fall on some partisan divide? Just like the vaccine wasn't approved until just after the election. How magical was that?
Would you really like to get into a contest as to who manipulated, suppressed and distorted information for political gain the most? I don't think I would take that bet if I were you. It happens on all sides but there are now coming to light some truly egregious examples of this type of behavior.
I think what we're seeing here is that any argument I make you're going to call it propaganda so you don't have to actually have a good faith debate about it. I don't blame you though because you're advocating from your platform of "my side is 100% right and yours is bad and wrong all the time." How about you expand on that some.
They did say exactly what I stated. How's that ideological? Everything is politicized these days by all sides. Please list for me any issue that doesn't seem to fall on some partisan divide? Just like the vaccine wasn't approved until just after the election. How magical was that?
Would you really like to get into a contest as to who manipulated, suppressed and distorted information for political gain the most? I don't think I would take that bet if I were you. It happens on all sides but there are now coming to light some truly egregious examples of this type of behavior.
I think what we're seeing here is that any argument I make you're going to call it propaganda so you don't have to actually have a good faith debate about it. I don't blame you though because you're advocating from your platform of "my side is 100% right and yours is bad and wrong all the time." How about you expand on that some.
The good faith argument:
Biden:
"The way he (Trump) talks about the vaccine is not particularly rational. He’s talking about it being ready, he’s going to talk about moving it quicker than the scientists think it should be moved … . People don’t believe that he’s telling the truth, therefore they’re not at all certain they’re going to take the vaccine. And one more thing: If and when the vaccine comes, it’s not likely to go through all the tests that need to be done, and the trials that are needed to be done."
Harris:
"If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I’ll be the first in line to take it. Absolutely. But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it."
Jeez, you're so aggravating. Fauci disagreed with Trump and even though you say you're not a Trump supporter, that painted him as a liberal in your mind and therefore he gets no passes from you. If he wasn't perfect at all times, he should be burned at the stake. In March/April 2020 he gave advice that made sense at the time and NO ONE knew better than him because they needed time to study it first. With your perfect hindsight, you knew the right answers all along. Now you you say we should have listened to others in the scientific community that are far less respected and have offered questionable advice. Trump appointed Fauci, he was the right man for the job and he advised him well, though Trump ignored a lot of it. End of story
Exactly. So instead, they waited and we had Joe Biden and Harris telling us we should take it and it wasn't tested as it needed to be, etc. So basically, the objection was Trump which is an entirely political premise. It's not as though Biden didn't know how things would work because he's almost been in government as long as I have been alive. We agree.
Let's try this a different way:
Dr. Marty Makary should have been there to talk about it
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya should have been there to discuss options
Dr. Martin Kulldorff should have been there as well
Dr. Sunetra Gupta should have been involved
Dr. Michael Farzan should have been there
Dr. Robert Garry should have been there
These are all some of the world's foremost experts on these matters. Yes, even more than Dr. Fauci or Dr. Collins from NIH. If we're facing a humanity altering crisis, we should seek all the best minds out and get their views on what we're doing. How is that partisan or propaganda? Wouldn't you want that? If you were diagnosed with cancer, would you not want all opinions from people you know are experts on the matter?
We also needed full disclosure that the NIH had funded gain of function research at the lab through a intermediary and that it was very likely it came from a lab. We also should have heard from Dr. Farzan and Dr. Garry about the virus coming from the lab before they took the $9m in funding from NIH and changed their stories about the lab leak. It's all so shadowy and the markers of corruption are everywhere.
I think they (policy makers/CDC/etc) followed what the majority of the medical field's opinion was at the time. Sure there were some differing views, but they seemed to follow what the majority believed was the correct choice at the time. I think a lot of the issue was a sizable portion of the population viewed COVID as something that wasn't as deadly as it actually ended up being, and didn't like the idea of having to wear masks for whatever reason. I think hindsight has taught us that the mask mandates probably should've been regionalized vs enacted broadly.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, warned against the idea of letting the virus spread in order to achieve herd immunity at a 12 October 2020 press briefing, calling the notion "unethical". He said: "Herd immunity is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached … Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it."[11][14] Tedros said that trying to achieve herd immunity by letting the virus spread unchecked would be "scientifically and ethically problematic", especially given that the long-term effects of the disease are still not fully understood.[11][14] He said that though "there has been some discussion recently about the concept of reaching so-called 'herd immunity' by letting the virus spread", "never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic."[11][14][49]
The British Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance told the House of Commons's Science and Technology Select Committee on 3 November that the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, having examined the declaration's proposal, had found "fatal flaws in the argument".[50] Concerns about the declaration had been issued on behalf of the British Academy of Medical Sciences by its president, Robert Lechler, who similarly described the declaration's proposals as "unethical and simply not possible".[42][51] Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, compared the declaration to "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".[47] On 7 October the British Prime Minister's Official Spokesperson said that while at 10 Downing Street "we have considered the full range of scientific opinion throughout the course of this pandemic and we will continue to do so", it was "not possible to rely on an unproven assumption that it is possible for people who are at lower risk, should they contract the virus, to avoid subsequently transmitting it to those who are at a higher risk and would face a higher risk of ending up in hospital, or worse in an intensive care unit."[52] The spokesman reiterated that the Chief Medical Adviser to the British Government and Chief Medical Officer for England, Chris Whitty, had stressed that the effects on the rest of the healthcare system were already considered in the formulation of public health advice.[52] British Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock said in the House of Commons on 13 October that the Great Barrington Declaration's two central claims – that widespread infection would lead to herd immunity and that it would be possible to segregate the old and vulnerable – were both "emphatically false".[53][54][55] On 15 October, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Leader of the House of Commons, told parliament: "The Government are sceptical about the Barrington declaration."[56][57] On 3 November, Chris Whitty told the Science and Technology Select Committee that the declaration was "dangerously flawed", "scientifically weak", and "ethically really difficult".[50][58][59] He explained that "Focused Protection" was operationally impractical and would "inevitably" cause the deaths of "a very large number of people".[50][58][59]
United States infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci called the proposals in the Great Barrington Declaration "nonsense and very dangerous".[12]
Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and lead member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, called the declaration "ridiculous", "total nonsense" and "very dangerous", saying that it would lead to a large number of avoidable deaths.[12][60][61] Fauci said that 30 percent of the population had underlying health conditions that made them vulnerable to the virus and that "older adults, even those who are otherwise healthy, are far more likely than young adults to become seriously ill if they get COVID-19."[60] He added, "This idea that we have the power to protect the vulnerable is total nonsense because history has shown that that's not the case. And if you talk to anybody who has any experience in epidemiology and infectious diseases, they will tell you that that is risky, and you'll wind up with many more infections of vulnerable people, which will lead to hospitalizations and deaths. So I think that we just got to look that square in the eye and say it's nonsense."[60] The Infectious Diseases Society of America, representing over 12,000 doctors and scientists, released a statement calling the Great Barrington Declaration's proposals "inappropriate, irresponsible and ill-informed".[62] 14 other American public-health groups, among them the Trust for America's Health and the American Public Health Association, published an open letter in which they warned that following the recommendations of the Great Barrington Declaration would "haphazardly and unnecessarily sacrifice lives", adding that "the declaration is not a strategy, it is a political statement. It ignores sound public health expertise. It preys on a frustrated populace. Instead of selling false hope that will predictably backfire, we must focus on how to manage this pandemic in a safe, responsible, and equitable way."[10] Europe's largest association of virologists, the Gesellschaft für Virologie [de], released a statement co-authored by Christian Drosten saying the declaration's proposals were liable to result in "a humanitarian and economic catastrophe".[63]
The then-U.S. National Institutes of Health director, Francis Collins, told The Washington Post that the proposed strategy was "a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment."[13][5] In a private email to Fauci, Collins called the authors of the declaration "fringe epidemiologists" and said that "(it). . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises".[33][64] The Wall Street Journal's editorial board accused Collins of "work[ing] with the media to trash the Great Barrington Declaration" and of "Shut[ting] down covid debate".[64]
William Haseltine, a former Harvard Medical School professor and founder of Harvard's cancer and HIV/AIDS research departments, told CNN, "Herd immunity is another word for mass murder. If you allow this virus to spread … we are looking at 2 to 6 million Americans dead. Not just this year, but every year."[13]
David Naylor, co-chair of the Government of Canada's COVID-19 Immunity Task Force, told the National Post: "Obviously, the Great Barrington fix will excite the minimizers who pretend COVID-19 is not much worse than the flu and enliven the libertarians who object to public health measures on principle … So be it: they've been offside all along."[7] Naylor also pointed out that a study published in August in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine examined Sweden's "no-lockdown" policy's effect on herd immunity among the Swedish population, finding it did not improve herd immunity despite higher rates of hospitalization and death than in neighbouring countries.[7][65] According to Naylor, the policy advocated by signatories of the declaration would never be the "controlled demographic burn that some zealots imagine", and because of exponential growth of infections would lead to a situation where "with masses of people sick in their 40s and 50s; hospitals will be over-run and deaths will skyrocket as they did in Italy and New York".[7] With the prospect of a vaccine available within months, Naylor questioned the logic of the Great Barrington strategy, asking: "Why on earth should we rush to embrace a reckless prescription for a demographically-selective national 'chickenpox party' involving a dangerous pathogen?".[7]
Deena Hinshaw, Chief Medical Officer of Health of Alberta, said that the declaration would lead to increased deaths, hospitalizations and cases of Long COVID. Hinshaw also said that it was unclear if infection with COVID-19 would create long-term immunity and that being able to successfully implement the declaration's focused protection strategy "is not supported by evidence."[66]
Harvard University professor of epidemiology William Hanage criticized the logic of the declaration's signatories: "After pointing out, correctly, the indirect damage caused by the pandemic, they respond that the answer is to increase the direct damage caused by it", and attacked the feasibility of the idea of "Focused Protection" for those vulnerable to severe infection, saying that "stating that you can keep the virus out of places by testing at a time when the White House has an apparently ongoing outbreak should illustrate how likely that is."[19] He asked, "How would you keep the virus out if 10 percent of the younger population is infected at peak prevalence and with tests that cannot keep the virus out of the White House?"[67] He called the declaration "quite dangerous, for multiple reasons", explaining that "if you do this, you'll get more infections, more hospitalizations and more deaths" and that "the greatest risk of introduction to the most vulnerable communities will be when the rate of infection is really high in younger age groups."[67] Hanage cautioned that uncontrolled infections among the young run the risk of long-term medical effects of the disease.[19] He added that "we tend to make contacts with people around our own age, and given that none of the older generations would have immunity, they'd be in contact networks at risk of devastating outbreaks" and further explained that blanket lockdowns were not argued for by most experts in any case.[67]
_(cropped).jpg)
David Nabarro, a special envoy of the World Health Organization, said lockdowns can be avoided "if governments impose some reasonable restrictions like social distancing and universal masks and install test and trace strategies."[68]
David Nabarro, a special envoy of the World Health Organization, said governments should refrain from using "lockdowns as the primary method to control the virus", a comment cited with approval by the American president, Donald Trump.[68] However, Nabarro rejected Trump's interpretation of his comments, saying that the lockdowns in the spring had been necessary as emergency measures, to buy time, and emphasized the need to find a "middle way", with "masks, social distancing, fewer crowds, testing and tracing" the right way forward.[68] Commenting on the fact that 20 per cent of people killed by COVID-19 have been people aged under 65, and that about a third of recovered COVID-19 patients, including young patients, continue to have symptoms weeks after their infection, Nabarro said it was "amazingly irresponsible" not to take these risks into consideration.[68]
Gregg Gonsalves, assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale University, described the strategy proposed by the declaration as "culling the herd of the sick and disabled", calling it "grotesque".[69] Arguing nearly half the American population is considered to have underlying risk factors for the infection, he advocated for the prevailing quarantine strategy, since peaks in infection rates among the young were likely to correlate with deaths of more vulnerable older people.[67] He wrote: "If you're going to turbo-charge community spread, as everyone else at 'low-risk' goes about their business, I want the plan for my 86-year-old mother to be more than theoretical."[67]
The Francis Crick Institute's group leader of the cell biology of infection laboratory, Rupert Beale, said herd immunity is "very unlikely" to be built up before a COVID-19 vaccine is generally implemented.[70][52] Of the Great Barrington Declaration he said the "declaration prioritises just one aspect of a sensible strategy – protecting the vulnerable – and suggests we can safely build up 'herd immunity' in the rest of the population. This is wishful thinking. It is not possible to fully identify vulnerable individuals, and it is not possible to fully isolate them. Furthermore, we know that immunity to coronaviruses wanes over time, and re-infection is possible – so lasting protection of vulnerable individuals by establishing 'herd immunity' is very unlikely to be achieved in the absence of a vaccine."[70][52] Beale described the declaration as "not a helpful contribution to the debate".[52] Of the declarations' signatories he said: "There's a lot of other people who have also signed it and guess what, it's the usual suspects … It's Karol Sikora who knows nothing about this whatsoever but who is endlessly self-promoting, and you've got Michael Levitt who's got a bad case of Nobel Prize disease."[25] Beale criticized Gupta's actions, saying, "You've got someone who has a track record of saying stuff that is total rubbish, and then moving on to the next thing which is total rubbish, and she's not being held to account. That makes people pretty annoyed."[25] Of the declaration's other critics, Beale said: "That's everyone being polite … What everyone really thinks is, 'this is all ****ing stupid'."[25]
Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, said that the declaration "sounds good in theory" but would not work in practice.[71]
Devi Sridhar, the University of Edinburgh's professor of global public health, said that the declaration "sounds good in theory" but that "if you actually work in practical public health on the front line, it doesn't make much sense", saying the declaration's premise was neither "accurate" nor "scientific".[71] Michael Head, senior research fellow in global health at University of Southampton, said the declaration was "a very bad idea" and doubted if vulnerable people could avoid the virus if it were allowed to spread.[46] He also said that "ultimately, the Barrington Declaration is based on principles that are dangerous to national and global public health".[46] He said: "There are countries who are managing the pandemic relatively well, including South Korea and New Zealand, and their strategies do not include simply letting the virus run wild whilst hoping that the asthmatic community and the elderly can find somewhere to hide for 12 months."[7][15] Associate professor at the University of Leeds's School of Medicine Stephen Griffin criticized the declaration's flaws in ethics, logistics, and science, pointing out the risk of long-term effects of infection in even those less vulnerable to severe infection.[72] He said: "Ethically, history has taught us that the notion of segregating society, even perhaps with good initial intentions, usually ends in suffering."[73] Simon Clarke, associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, questioned whether herd immunity was possible for SARS-CoV-2: "Natural, lasting, protective immunity to the disease would be needed, and we don't know how effective or long-lasting people's post-infection immunity will be."[72] Michael Osterholm, an American epidemiologist, regents professor, and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said that the Great Barrington Declaration was "a dangerous mix of pixie dust and pseudoscience."[74]
John M. Barry, a professor at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and author of a book on the 1918 flu pandemic, wrote in The New York Times that the Great Barrington Declaration sounds attractive until one examines "three enormously important omissions".[75] Firstly, it says nothing about harm suffered by people in low-risk groups, even though a significant number of patients who recover from COVID-19, including people who experience no symptoms, have been shown to have heart and lung damage.[75] Secondly, it says nothing about how to shield the vulnerable, and thirdly, it says nothing about the number of dead the strategy would cause, which Barry estimates might "far exceed one million".[75] Barry said that while it was too late for the United States to achieve "near containment of the virus", as South Korea, Australia and Japan had done, the US could still aim for results comparable to those of Canada or Germany, where daily deaths were a couple of dozen at the time of writing (October 2020).[75]
Writing for Science-Based Medicine, David Gorski said that the Great Barrington Declaration was a form of astroturfing similar to that which had previously been used for AIDS denial, climate change denial and creationism advocacy, but this time being deployed for COVID-19 denial, and amounted in practice to an argument for eugenics. Gorski speculated whether the scientists fronting the declaration were simply being useful idiots for AIER or whether they were actively being "motivated more by ideology than science", but said that the practical effect was that the declaration provided a narrative of scientific division useful for political purposes.[76] The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), at whose meeting the declaration was launched, has been described as a libertarian think tank that has received funding from the Koch Foundation and engages in climate change denial.[15][41][77]
Tyler Cowen, a libertarian economist at George Mason University, wrote that while he sympathized with a libertarian approach to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, he considered the declaration to be dangerous and misguided.[78]
Exactly. And they condemned it without due consideration and guess what happened? We needed a debate and a discussion about all this. The Great Barrington doctors ended up being largely correct. It would have been a valued voice in the room.
I find it hard to believe you just linked a Wiki page. As the President would say, "C'mon man!"
I find it hard to believe you just linked a Wiki page. As the President would say, "C'mon man!"
Not really. These comments were made months before any vaccine was made available. At that point, we had trump promising a vaccine at warp speed, but the drug companies were not making promises.
And for the record, when the vaccine was available and approved by science, Biden and Harris got the vaccine on national TV. trump got his in secret because he is a little bitch.
I don't know why you don't run for King of the World, since you, and you only, knows what's correct.
I don't know these things. I just read the results.
And you didn't answer my primary question. How is it bad to have myriad recognized experts discussing ideas on the best way to handle an unprecedented situation like COVID?
And the approval was rushed and we have seen numerous unforeseen challenges that have gone largely unaddressed because of a rather silly commitment to the desired narrative.
