Thread by @DanielFalush

I am a bit late to this party but this is what I have to say about "Great Barrington Declaration" about COVID strategy. gbdeclaration.org translated into 24 languages here.

Two of its three authors, Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya have separately published estimates of immunity through infection that were (a) scientifically flawed and (b) considerably higher than the truth but were most adept at getting public attention for these wrong estimates.

While the declaration itself suggests a policy without any quantitative estimates backing it up, nor indeed any caveats about in what circumstances the strategy might or might not be the best one.

To falsify their argument by absurdity, in China the current rate of infection is to essentially 0. And for the sake of argument a widely distributable vaccine is 3-6 months away.

The authors state "Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal." In the Chinese context, this would mean abandoning quarantining of new arrivals and the other ongoing measures that are keeping the rate of infection extremely close to 0.

This would essentially set up a race between the inevitable exponential increase of the virus and and the ability of people to shield their elderly relatives until a vaccine could be delivered to them. Plus of course the risk of long term harm to lower risk individuals.

Of course this strategy would not be the most compassionate, or indeed the most economically or in any other respects sensible approach for China. Carrying on as they are for 6 months or so while a vaccine is rolled out would obviously be better.

But the document does nothing to attempt to delineate between circumstances where the strategy might be the most appropriate one - i.e. where the costs of poorly effective attempts to suppress general transmission have become too high and circumstances where it would not.

Allowing the virus to circulate uncontrolled is a one way street. there is no going back. Its therefore *at best* a last resort that should be based on sober, conservative calculation of relative harms.

The authors have already shown that they cannot be trusted to produce these sober, conservative estimates or to communicate them appropriately.

Propagandizing for an end to control of virus circulation makes this goal harder to achieve everywhere that the document is taken seriously. In China it will be ignored but in other places especially where the virus is currently reasonably well controlled it can do real harm.

As a group, scientists like to encourage freedom of thought. Some of us are particularly talented at getting our ideas heard by saying provocative things. Unfortunately all the Great Barrington Document really is
is provocative expression of enticing ideas. Harmful trolling.