A few weeks ago, emails obtained via FOI request revealed how America’s most senior government scientists sought to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration. In particular, the email below was sent by Francis Collins (former director of the National Institutes of Health) to Anthony Fauci:
Amazingly, Collins refers to the authors of the Declaration as “three fringe epidemiologists”, despite the fact that they held positions at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford respectively. (If even Harvard professors are considered “fringe”, there isn’t much hope for the rest of us…)
The use of “fringe” is particularly egregious when you consider that lockdowns represent a radical departure from the pre-Covid science. As Fauci himself stated on the January 24th last year: “Historically when you shut things down it doesn’t have a major effect.”
Collins then wrote, “There needs to be a quick and devastating takedown of its premise.” Which sounds like the sort of thing a PR consultant would say – not a supposedly neutral scientist. Further details of the exchange can be found in this article by Phil Magness, who actually obtained the emails.
Now two of the Great Barrington authors have hit back at Collins and Fauci. Writing in the Epoch Times, Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya say that their critics “got the pandemic strategy they advocated for, and they own the results”. As the two professors explain:
Lockdowns protected young low-risk affluent work-from-home professionals, such as administrators, scientists, professors, journalists, and lawyers, while older high-risk members of the working class were exposed and died in unnecessarily high numbers. This failure to understand that lockdowns could not protect the vulnerable led to the tragically high death counts from Covid.
Kulldorff and Bhattacharya’s piece offers a clear and forthright defence of the Great Barrington Declaration. Worth reading in full.
