Is Great Barrington Declaration a Solution to Endless COVID Lockdowns?

Let's be honest. As we approach late autumn and then winter in the northern hemisphere, nobody knows what's going to happen. We may see another surge in coronavirus cases, or we may not. We may see flu season exacerbate the effects of COVID, or we may not. We just don't know.

Making the situation worse is that this uncertainty is absolutely killing the economy. Go downtown in any major American city. It's a ghost town. We can't live like this indefinitely. Is there some other approach that we can take as a society to minimize the harm of COVID while maximizing productivity and happiness? A group of successful and respected infectious disease experts says yes, and they have written a statement that they have called the Great Barrington Declaration.

The authors refer to their approach as "Focused Protection," the gist of which is "to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk." Not that this really matters (because public health policy shouldn't be a popularity contest), but more than 10,000 scientists and medical practitioners have signed it.

Are the authors right? I certainly think so. Back in May, we reported on a Swedish epidemiologist who believed that lockdowns did nothing other than delay the inevitable; i.e., they simply push new infections down the timeline. Therefore, while lockdowns can be useful to avoid overwhelming hospital bed capacity, they may not lower the overall number of cases. In other words, we're destroying the economy while essentially accomplishing nothing.

Worse than that, like all policies, lockdowns are having negative unintended consequences, such as delaying cancer detection and treatments and increasing the number of people with depression or other mental illness. Divorce has increased. Some have argued that, in terms of saving lives, the costs of the lockdown outweighed the benefits.

Legitimate Criticisms of the Great Barrington Declaration

While I support the policy proposed by the Great Barrington Declaration, some of the justifications given by the authors are not quite right. For instance, it is incredibly unlikely that society will undergo a total lockdown again. As Dr. Henry Miller wrote in an email to me, "The term 'lockdown' is misleading [because] restrictions and mandates are not like an on-off switch; they're more like a dimmer switch, so you can titrate according to circumstances."

In other words, the authors make a convincing argument against lockdowns, but we probably won't have those again. Instead, we will have a situation in which society is more open than at other times.

Furthermore, Dr. Miller noted that "more than a third of the U.S. population has one or more comorbidities, and a significant fraction of people who recover suffer persistent symptoms." That means there could be considerable risk to allowing the virus to spread through the healthy population. Some people who think they are healthy actually may not be.

Other critics have noted that the authors don't really propose many solutions, such as how exactly we can protect the vulnerable. There are far more susceptible people than those living in nursing homes.

Ridiculous Criticisms of the Great Barrington Declaration

Not all criticisms of the declaration are legitimate. Matt Reynolds, the science editor at Wired UK, wrote that "there is little about the Great Barrington Declaration that feels convincingly scientific." Of course, granted that he has absolutely zero training in science, it's difficult to know how Mr. Reynolds can tell when something "feels" scientific enough. (His bachelor's degree in English apparently offers no help here.)

As if to prove that he has no business writing about science, Mr. Reynolds goes on to compare the argument made by the infectious disease researchers to those made by tobacco companies. The point he is trying to make is that there is no actual debate; only those with a nefarious agenda could possibly support the Declaration. That is such a nasty and obnoxious smear that it's not even worth addressing, and it's frankly embarrassing that Wired can't find a better science editor.

A Verdict on the Great Barrington Declaration?

The proposal in the Declaration is certainly worth considering. If I was a policymaker, I would investigate how to implement it. As COVID cases spike in Europe, which once had the coronavirus under control, it's becoming clear that our current on-again, off-again approach to containment isn't working as intended. It may be time to try something new.