Jay Bhattacharya: Anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration vindicated, but much too late By spring 2021, every elderly person in the U.S. had been offered two doses of a vaccine, but the failed containment strategy continued

Posted By on January 28th, 2023

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/anti-lockdown-great-barrington-declaration-vindicated-but-much-too-late

Though little noted by the public, Thursday, Aug. 11, 2022, was an enormously important day in the history of the pandemic. Prior to that day, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control recommended that anyone who came in contact with a covid positive patient quarantine for a time. For unvaccinated exposed kids, the old guidance counselled either quarantine or negative tests to return to school.  

The new guidance eliminated the recommendation for testing people with no symptoms and eliminated the distinction between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in testing recommendations. The reasoning for the CDC’s shift was explicit. In describing that rationale, Greta Massetti of the CDC said, “this guidance … helps us move to a point where COVID-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives. We know that COVID-19 is here to stay.”

The CDC’s shift represented a fundamental change in the underlying philosophy of pandemic management. Ever since March 2020 and the infamous “two weeks to slow the spread,” the CDC’s goal — not achieved — had been to reduce or eliminate the spread of the virus. The new guidance accepted the obvious fact that the containment strategy had imposed enormous collateral harm to children, small business owners, and the working class and had not protected the vulnerable against the virus. After years of zoom school, close-contact quarantines, and missed assignments, the lockdown on American kids’ education essentially ended on Aug. 11.

In its place, the CDC adopted a more pragmatic approach more in line with how it had managed the 2009 swine flu pandemic. There is a more than thousand fold higher risk of severe disease outcomes from COVID-19 for infected elderly patients than there is for children who are very rarely hospitalized or die if infected. So not unreasonably, the CDC maintained recommendations aimed at reducing disease spread in nursing homes, such as good ventilation and vigilant testing.  

The COVID vaccines have proved effective in substantially reducing the risk of mortality upon infection for older people, so again not unreasonably, the CDC maintained its recommendation for that population to vaccinate. At the same time, the vaccines have proved utterly incapable of stopping infection or disease spread. The CDC’s previous guidance had explicitly and irrationally promulgated discrimination against unvaccinated individuals. The new guidance specifically recommended against such discrimination, at least insofar as testing for the disease is concerned.

For those who have followed dissident voices during the pandemic, the broad outlines of the CDC’s new strategy should have been familiar. On Aug. 11, the CDC eschewed COVID containment as a goal and replaced it with a plan of focused protection of vulnerable people. The CDC cited widespread immune protection provided by recovery from COVID infection and vaccination in the American population as the primary reason for the shift in strategy. 

Though it did not explicitly say so, the CDC has embraced the core principles of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) — a document I coauthored along with Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University and Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford in October 2020. The GBD called for focused protection of vulnerable people (e.g., the elderly) and lifting lockdown restrictions so that the less vulnerable could live more normal lives. The declaration provided numerous concrete suggestions about how to protect the vulnerable until widespread population immunity was achieved.

While commendable, the CDC’s shift in strategy came far too late in the pandemic. In response to the GBD, some in October 2020 argued that we should wait until a vaccine before lifting lockdown. Though the declaration noted that vaccines can “assist” in achieving this immunity, we maintained that keeping lockdown “measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”

 

When we wrote the GBD, lockdowns had already caused millions of school children to lose out on education, consigning them to poorer, shorter, and less healthy lives. Millions had already delayed necessary health care, including cancer screening, care for anxiety and depression, and even treatment for heart disease and diabetes. Many have paid the price by preventable death due to deadly but manageable chronic conditions. The economic harm from lockdown policies had already harmed the health and well-being of poor people worldwide in rich and poor countries, impoverishing tens of millions and pushing countless people to the brink of starvation. And these harms were and are unequally distributed, with the laptop class largely shielded. 

By March or April 2021, every elderly person in the United States had been offered two doses of a COVID vaccine, and effective treatments like monoclonal antibodies were available to prevent severe disease. The vulnerable were as protected as existing technology could manage. Instead, the CDC and the Biden administration stubbornly stuck to their failed containment strategy, multiplying and extending the catastrophic harms from the restrictions.  

Now, in January 2023, it is time to fully embrace the hard lessons to be learned from the CDC’s years-long failed pandemic management. Prudence requires that politicians and public health officials consider the harms of policies adopted at least as seriously as their putative benefits. Pandemic strategies should never again privilege the laptop class and other affluent populations over the poor. Public health should eschew wishful thinking, fearmongering, and policies that effectively divide society into clean and unclean. Protection of the vulnerable, whoever that may be in the next pandemic, should be the linchpin of pandemic management. And lockdowns should be consigned to the dustbin of history where they belong.  

 

We will need a new generation of public health and political leaders to accomplish this. Over the last four weeks, Anthony Fauci, the key architect of the lockdown strategy, resigned his perch atop the public health bureaucracy. Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand and ardent enforcer of lockdowns, announced her resignation. These leadership changes are a good start, but the people who replace them must embrace the principles of the GBD, as the CDC finally has, if we are to avoid a repeat of the worst avoidable peacetime public catastrophe in history during the next pandemic. 

 

Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, is a professor of health policy at Stanford University and a founding fellow of Hillsdale College’s Academy of Science and Freedom. 

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