Six months on and thousands of scientists and medical practitioners across the globe have endorsed the strategy I proposed back in March to fight COVID19. At the time of writing, 4,499 Medical and Public health Scientists, along with 8,264 Medical Practitioners, from across the globe, including Britain, have signed The Great Barrington Declaration . Its position is that I have argued all along. It argues that lockdowns are ineffective and counter-productive.
“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.
Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”
It argues that instead, we should focus on shielding the 20% of the population actually at serious risk from the virus, what it calls focused protection.
“Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.”
And, because it is based upon a scientific analysis of the facts, rather than an emotional response to a moral panic, or desire to score cheap political points based upon opportunism, it recognises that COVID19 is a virus that almost exclusively targets the elderly, who should be shielded in this manner, whilst allowing the other 80% of the population to go about their business normally, so as also, thereby, to build herd immunity, and so destroy the virus and its potential to harm the vulnerable.
“We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.
As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity...
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.”
There are minor elements I would quibble with, such as, in care homes and hospitals, it should have also emphasised the need for PPE, and for contact protocols to stop the spread of infection, and, in relation to workplaces, there is no reason to insist on workers going in to work if they can continue to work efficiently from home. In addition, in workplaces, we should insist on workers' health and safety representatives being able to determine required safe working conditions before work can continue etc. But, overall, this is the strategy I suggested back in March. So, why has it taken this long for all of these scientists to come out and make this stand?
Well, of course, its not true that it has. Some of those involved, such as Professor Sunetra Gupta have been making this case for as long as I have. Back in March, I did not suck the strategy out of my thumb, but only after researching the facts about the virus and its effects, as well as on the back of years of experience as a trades unionist, and involvement in public policy formation, and knowledge of risk assessment, and standard operating procedures. From the beginning I, therefore, relied on the science and views of scientists such as Professor John Ioaniddis, or Doctor Wodarg, and so on, all of whom were pointing out that the media hype and political propaganda that was being fed to the public was simply not sustained by the facts and the evidence we already had. Indeed, early on, government scientists too talked about the development of herd immunity, but all of this was quickly drowned out by the chorus of moronic disapproval of that term, by people who either had no idea what it meant, or else who did, but saw its optics as nothing more than an opportunity to score cheap political points, as they pushed headlong into demands for the implementation of lockdowns that have had devastating effects on populations across the globe, and particular on the poorest and most vulnerable in the world's population.
Those that pointed out that the virus targets essentially only the old, with those with underlying conditions coming a distant second, were accused of being liars, with the only evidence being that a handful of the tens of thousands of people that have died, were people who were under 60, and were apparently healthy. This is like claiming that there is no correlation between smoking and lung cancer on the grounds that a handful of lifelong smokers live into their 90's, whilst a handful of non-smokers die from lung cancer in their 20's! Yet, the truth is, as the statement says, that the elderly are 1,000 times more likely to die or suffer serious illness – including so called long COVID – than are the young. This is why by far the greatest concentrations of deaths have been in care homes across the developed world, or else in hospitals, where the elderly are concentrated. It shows that in the very places where the vulnerable should have been safe and protected they were instead put at greatest risk.
It is also why, several months on, and with the peak of deaths in those locations probably behind us, even as infection rates have increased rapidly, as countries inevitably had to lift lockdowns and test and trace regimes, the rise in hospitalisations and of deaths has not risen in the same proportion. As Britain enters flu season, we see that currently there are, on average, five times as many people dying from flu than there are from COVID. For those under 40, the figure is ten times as many deaths from flu as from COVID.
Those that argued that a vaccine was a long time away, and that lockdowns could not be sustained, and would not work, so that the only rational solution was herd immunity were accused of all sorts of heinous crimes, including being social Darwinists, who wanted to kill off the elderly and sick – despite the fact that most who have argued for this course of action have made a point of saying that the whole point is to divert society's resources into providing the greatest protection for the elderly and the sick!!!
But, along with all of the attempts at bullying to prevent the presentation of the facts and the scientific evidence, what has also marked that response from the proponents of lockdowns has been their willingness to effectively lie openly so as to present their case, and to deny the facts. They have used the age old tactic of guilt by association and the amalgam. So, for example, proponents of the lockdown have presented matters as though it is a question of lockdown/test and trace or a complete free for all. But, this has never been the choice. I know of very few, even of the Libertarians, who have argued that there should be simply a free for all. In that, I obviously discount the agents provocateurs, Trumpists, Ickeheads and other conspiracy nuts, who claim that its all a hoax.
Yet, the proponents of lockdown have had to present the alternatives in this way in order to sustain their own arguments. They have tried to present the opponents of lockdown as all being right-wing Libertarians, and, in so doing, they thereby attempt an amalgam of anyone on the Left making the argument against the lockdown with those on the Right. So, when Professor Gupta appeared recently on Sky, her opponent made precisely this argument that even if she wasn't a Libertarian most of those opposing lockdowns were, as though this, in itself, was an argument against the facts and strategy that Gupta herself was presenting.
But, it is those that are promoting lockdowns that are doing the greatest disservice to the poor and the vulnerable, because not only does their strategy fail to deal with the virus, but it has already caused huge economic damage that will mostly affect the poor and vulnerable. For many on the Left who have done so, it appears to be driven mostly out of their own middle-class, short-term political agenda to try to score political points against Johnson in Britain and Trump in the US, and for some it is driven by a similarly self-centred, catastrophism that sees any such catastrophe as fulfilling their delusions about a socialist rebellion arising out of some catastrophic collapse of capitalism stemming from either its economy or from the environment.
The position adopted in the Great Barrington Declaration is also backed up by the findings of a group at Edinburgh University, who have concluded that although lockdowns may have reduced initial deaths, they have prolonged the outbreak and increase total deaths in the longer term. Like the GBD, they argue for other strategies including a focus on shielding the elderly and vulnerable, whilst the majority are able to resume activity, and build up required levels of herd immunity.
The Edinburgh University study called for "different strategies for different age groups with more focus on shielding elderly and vulnerable people".
The Edinburgh scientists reviewed the work of Neil Ferguson and the group at Imperial whose dire predictions spawned the moral panic that has engulfed the globe in the last 6 months. The team at Imperial, in 2009, predicted that there would be 45 million deaths globally from Swine Flu, with a mortality rate of around 1%. In actual fact, the mortality rate was a tiny fraction of that. The Imperial team, on the basis of the same methodology, again predicted 45 million deaths globally, and a mortality rate of around 1%. In fact, so far, the global deaths have only just reached 1 million, just 2% of the figure predicted by Imperial. They also predicted up to 500,000 deaths in Britain, with some reports that Boris Johnson had been told that, without any measures, deaths could reach 1.5 million. In fact, deaths have reached only just over 40,000, or a little less than in the 1968 Flu pandemic, and about twice the number of deaths in more recent bad flu years. By no means an existential threat, and almost entirely down to the deaths of old people in care homes and hospitals, where inadequate measures to protect vulnerable people were undertaken.
The Edinburgh team used the same model as that of Imperial to examine the effects of different measures.
Sky reports,
“Graeme Ackland, professor of computer simulation from the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy who led the study, said: "In the short-term, closing schools contributed to reducing the severity of the first wave, to the extent that Nightingale hospitals were not needed, but the decision has left us more vulnerable to subsequent waves of infection."
They conclude that by prolonging the epidemic these measures will result in more deaths in the longer-term. The researchers conclude that when measures are lifted a substantial proportion of the population are still vulnerable so that the virus flares up and more deaths occur. That is precisely the argument I made back in March. Also confirming the point I have made repeatedly they say,
“... the final death toll from COVID-19 depends largely on the age of those infected and not the overall number of cases.”
That is precisely what I have said all along that the fetish of infections is irrational, because 80% of the population are asymptomatic or have only very minor symptoms when infected, so what does it matter how many people are infected. What counts is preventing those actually at risk from being infected, and that is best achieved by isolating that minority of the population.
What the study also confirmed is that 80% of those infected are asymptomatic or have only minor symptoms, and so there are already, at least, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of asymptomatic carriers of the virus in circulation, who are, in turn, spreading the virus to others, who, in the majority, will also be asymptomatic. This shows why the idea of test and trace is a non-starter. It also means, as researchers at Oxford suggested, some time ago, that the actual number of people who have had the virus, and who now have immunity, is probably much larger than current estimates would suggest.
Yet, the media continues to play down the scientific evidence and to highlight the spurious claims and distortions. Today, for example, the media have reported the ONS data showing that three times as many people have died from COVID, between January and August, as died from Flu or pneumonia. Of course, during the Summer months, few people, relatively, die from Flu and pneumonia, compared to the Winter, but those months have been the peak for COVID deaths. And, that period also saw a peak, because it was during this time that the large number of deaths in care homes occurred. Even if we take Britain, currently, that picture appears totally different. Earlier in the year, up to 1,000 people per day were dying from COVID, whereas, today, even with infections at nearly similar levels, deaths are down to around only 70. Taking an average from January, is therefore, grossly misleading in understanding current conditions.
The same is true when data related to Sweden is presented as evidence. Sweden like elsewhere suffered a relatively high number of fatalities in its care homes. Leaving those numbers in the calculation produces a high average figure for Sweden's overall per capita mortality rate. But, the reality is that Sweden essentially reduced its current mortality from COVID to zero months ago. Its number of deaths last month from COVID came in at an average of less than 2 per day. If we look at its current position, what might be termed its marginal position, rather than its average position, Sweden would come in as having one of the lowest per capita mortality rates from COVID in the world.
And, even the data on deaths is still unreliable. A while ago, Britain reduced its total number of COVID deaths by several thousand, because it recognised that several thousand people, who had previously been diagnosed as having COVID had died, and been included in the figures, even though their death was due to some other cause. This is the distinction of people who die “with” COVID as against those that die “from” COVID. In other words, if I have a bad heart, and I am also subsequently diagnosed as having COVID, my death from a heart attack may have nothing to do with the infection. As an extreme example, someone who had been tested and found to have COVID, might be run over by a bus at some future point, and yet their death was being included in the COVID mortality statistics. Now, deaths must occur within 28 days of having been diagnosed with COVID, but that still leaves large numbers of people included in the statistics, who actually died from other causes, and not from COVID itself.
Worse still is what has been argued in relation to excess deaths. Excess deaths is the figure for the number of additional deaths that occur over a given period compared to the number of deaths on average, over the same period. But, in Britain, in recent years, the average number of deaths is 500,000, whilst in the worst recent year it was as high as 625,000, or more than 25% higher. So, how exactly is this usual variation to be distinguished as being due to COVID? Indeed, we would expect to see excess deaths rise in this year, but not as a result of COVID. We would expect the number of excess deaths to rise as a result instead of the government lockdown. The economic catastrophe caused by the lockdown will have affected the lives and health of millions of the most deprived in Britain. Already its effect has been seen on food banks, on the numbers suffering from mental health problems, from domestic abuse and so on. In addition, because the NHS failed to establish isolation hospitals, it told people to stay away from hospitals, so that thousands of people who needed treatment for other illnesses did not get it, despite many hospitals being down to only 40% occupancy rates. We had operations, scans, and cancer screening cancelled, and so on. All of this leads to a large number of excess deaths, but it is nothing to do with COVID. It is down to the imposition of the idiotic lockdowns implemented by government.
Now we also have the attempt to make young people, and particularly students, the scapegoats for the governments idiotic and failed lockdown policy. We are told that the high rates of infections are all down to irresponsible students in university towns in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham and so on. Yet, the reality is that many of these areas have had local harsh lockdown policies in place for weeks, and yet, during that time infection rates have risen rather than fallen. Moreover, if the rise in infections is down to students why then are not the highest rates of infection in Oxford and Cambridge, which have huge student populations, or in London, which has the highest number of Universities in the country?
In short, the government's lockdown has been a disaster. It does not address the problem of COVID and it has sent the economy into the worst economic slowdown in 300 years, whose main effect is on the most vulnerable in society. The science has been clear all along that the best way to deal with it was as set out in the Great Barrington Declaration, and indeed as I set out back in March. If we had a principled, effective Labour opposition, they would have been the ones making this case for the last six months against the government, rather than individuals like me, or the scientists that have signed the Declaration. Instead Starmer has acted as Johnson's second lieutenant, throughout this crisis, urging him only to take even more authoritarian measures, just as he has begged Johnson to press ahead with a devastating programme of Brexit. We deserve much better than this.
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