No he had an opinion. The “Not So” Great Barrington Declaration https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/view/viewpoint-the-not-so-great-barrington-declaration And there are other major problems with the false narrative of herd immunity: First, lasting immunity is in doubt. There have been at least four studies to date which have found neutralizing antibodies to be of short duration in SARS-CoV-2 patients. The most recent, was published in JAMA Network and reported similar results to previous studies, with 58% of individuals with antibodies at baseline becoming seronegative at 60 days. Second, the virus is constantly mutating. The websitewww.nextstrain.orgshows the mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. There are hundreds and unfortunately some of them may involve the virus’s spike protein which is the basis for the effectiveness of our immunity, vaccines, and monoclonal antibody therapies. Researchers from Peking University Health Science Center have identified viruses with increased infectivity and 10 strains which were “remarkably resistant to some” monoclonal antibodies. Reinfections are starting to be reported, but thankfully still appear to be a rare occurrence.In two of the documented cases, viral RNA was available from both the first and second infection, proving the reinfection. Of concern, is that the patient’s second infection was worse than the first, giving rise to the possibility of immunological enhancement of the disease. This could of course complicate vaccine development. The exact incidence of reinfections is unknown. What is known is that it can occur. Isolation of Those At a Significant Risk is Not Possible: The 1918 flu pandemic took over two years and four waves for it to completely burnout, a similar time frame may well occur with SARS-CoV-2. How does one protect those at risk for that long of a time? Especially when the at risk comprises about half of the United States adult population.This includes those who are over the age of 65, or who have obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus, cancer, COPD, chronic kidney disease or heart conditions.Obesity alone is found in over 40% of our adult population.But even those between the ages of 20 and 44 have a 20% risk of hospitalizations. Emphasis on Mortality as the Only Concern of SARS-CoV-2 Virus: One of the Declaration’s goals is to “minimize mortality.”As knowledge of how to treat advanced disease increases, mortality has decreased. But similar to other fatal illnesses, survival is often associated with lasting disability. Unlike the flu, SARS-C0V-2 affects every organ of the body. During hospitalization there is a 20% chance of cardiac injury.Even in asymptomatic young athletes, MRI scans have been positive in approximately 15% of screened athletes with a positive SARS-CoV-2 test, including those who are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic.
Scientific consensus on the COVID-19 pandemic: we need to act now Nisreen A Alwan Rochelle Ann Burgess Simon Ashworth Rupert Beale Nahid Bhadelia Debby Bogaert et al. Show all authors Published:October 15, 2020 Any pandemic management strategy relying upon immunity from natural infections for COVID-19 is flawed. Uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity 3 and mortality across the whole population. In addition to the human cost, this would impact the workforce as a whole and overwhelm the ability of health-care systems to provide acute and routine care. Furthermore, there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection, 4 and the endemic transmission that would be the consequence of waning immunity would present a risk to vulnerable populations for the indefinite future. Such a strategy would not end the COVID-19 pandemic but result in recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination. It would also place an unacceptable burden on the economy and health-care workers, many of whom have died from COVID-19 or experienced trauma as a result of having to practise disaster medicine. Additionally, we still do not understand who might suffer from long COVID. 3 Defining who is vulnerable is complex, but even if we consider those at risk of severe illness, the proportion of vulnerable people constitute as much as 30% of the population in some regions. 8 Prolonged isolation of large swathes of the population is practically impossible and highly unethical. Empirical evidence from many countries shows that it is not feasible to restrict uncontrolled outbreaks to particular sections of society. Such an approach also risks further exacerbating the socioeconomic inequities and structural discriminations already laid bare by the pandemic. Special efforts to protect the most vulnerable are essential but must go hand-in-hand with multi-pronged population-level strategies. Once again, we face rapidly accelerating increase in COVID-19 cases across much of Europe, the USA, and many other countries across the world. It is critical to act decisively and urgently. Effective measures that suppress and control transmission need to be implemented widely, and they must be supported by financial and social programmes that encourage community responses and address the inequities that have been amplified by the pandemic. Continuing restrictions will probably be required in the short term, to reduce transmission and fix ineffective pandemic response systems, in order to prevent future lockdowns. The purpose of these restrictions is to effectively suppress SARS-CoV-2 infections to low levels that allow rapid detection of localised outbreaks and rapid response through efficient and comprehensive find, test, trace, isolate, and support systems so life can return to near-normal without the need for generalised restrictions. Protecting our economies is inextricably tied to controlling COVID-19. We must protect our workforce and avoid long-term uncertainty. Japan, Vietnam, and New Zealand, to name a few countries, have shown that robust public health responses can control transmission, allowing life to return to near-normal, and there are many such success stories. The evidence is very clear: controlling community spread of COVID-19 is the best way to protect our societies and economies until safe and effective vaccines and therapeutics arrive within the coming months. We cannot afford distractions that undermine an effective response; it is essential that we act urgently based on the evidence.
We’ve moved past interventions like masks as a country, but that doesn’t mean the Great Barrington Declaration advocates were right. Arguments against pandemic restrictions were made almost as soon as the first schools and offices were closed, typically by conservatives (though many liberals came around to the cause when vaccines arrived). But the case for relaxing restrictions was made most famously in a 2020 document called the Great Barrington Declaration. Written chiefly by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, it proposed that pandemic policy was doing more harm than good, that most people should live normal lives to build up immunity through infections and that the most vulnerable members of society could be protected in much more targeted ways than the one-size-fits-all approach that had been deployed to that point. It was a bundle of scientific claims and policy proposals, in other words, which itself is telling. Today you might be inclined to think about the question of mitigation simply at the level of policy, asking what restrictions were necessary or helpful, given a shared base of knowledge about Covid-19. But the debates early on were not just debates over policy trade-offs. They also concerned basic science. And on many of those critical points, those pushing against mitigation measures were wrong. Dr. Bhattacharya, for instance, proclaimedin The Wall Street Journal in March 2020 that Covid-19 was only one-tenth as deadly as the flu. In January 2021 he wrote an opinion essay for the Indian publication The Print suggesting that the majority of the country had acquired natural immunity from infection already and warning that a mass vaccination program would do more harm than good for people already infected. Shortly thereafter, the country’s brutal Delta wave killed perhaps several million Indians. In May 2020, Dr. Gupta suggestedthat the virus might kill around five in 10,000 people it infected, when the true figure in a naïve population was about one in 100 or 200, and that Covid was “on its way out” in Britain. At that point, it had killed about 45,000 Britons, and it would go on to kill about 170,000 more. The following year, Dr. Bhattacharya and Dr. Kulldorff together made the same point about the disease in the United States — that the pandemic was “on its way out” — on a day when the American death toll was approaching 600,000. Today it is 1.1 million and growing. This is not to say that these voices should have been silenced or driven from public debate. Some questions they raised were important matters of ongoing contestation, especially in the pandemic’s earliest days. As should be obvious three years in, pandemic policy did involve unmistakable trade-offs; the large, ongoing mortality under Mr. Biden is one reminder that mitigation was never as simple as just hitting the science button. But making arguments about those trade-offs using bad data or inaccurate timelines distorts the picture of the trade-off, of course. And to treat these arguments as merely political debates is to forget how much of the argument for reopening was based on bad science — and how much harder it would have been, at the time, to persuade many people using what turned out to be accurate data. As for the policy advice of the Great Barrington Declaration? The economist Tyler Cowen recently revisited the case for focused protection — the idea, emphasized in the declaration, that the most vulnerable members of society could have been shielded more aggressively while life continued mostly as normal for everyone else. (A study by his colleague Alex Tabarrok suggested this policy would have been hard to achieve, given that the death rates in the country’s best-resourced and best-run nursing homes were not better than the rates experienced in much more negligent settings. Mr. Tabarrok estimatesthere were larger missed opportunities in vaccinating nursing homes more quickly.) Mr. Cowen argued that actions that would have genuinely qualified, in retrospect, as protecting the vulnerable would have included preparing hospitals for patients in January 2020, accelerating vaccine rollout and uptake, and pushing for development of new treatments and promoting widespread testing. “If you were not out promoting those ideas, but instead talked about ‘protecting the vulnerable’ in a highly abstract manner, you were not doing much to protect the vulnerable,” he wrote. “Publishing papers suggesting a very, very low Covid-19 mortality rate, and then sticking with those results in media appearances after said results appeared extremely unlikely to be true,” he added, “endangered the vulnerable rather than protecting them.”
In my experience, it’s damn near impossible to fire a full professor no matter what wild **** they say as long as it’s not actual hate speech. So if he was actually fired from Harvard, it wouldn’t be because of his support of herd immunity.
1) The Great Barrington Declaration was right. 2) It was signed by many reputable scientists. 3) They were subjected to a Maoesque smear campaign by another clique of scientists that wanted more authoritarian measures like in China. 4) We have seen what a cesspool Harvard has become. Those who didn't toe the line of the woke mafia could easily get canceled and fired.
It is not about being right or wrong. Proposing Herd Immunity was an obvious and in your face solution to the pandemic. But even today getting herd immunity is flawed and there was no meaningful way to “protect the vulnerable” beyond what we collectively did as a society. The work was also written and endorsed by people who believed that COVID was in the rear view by Fall 2020. But it absolutely was not. Their reputations or pedigrees are not the issue, it was a policy piece first and foremost. We never had anything like China. We also had worse mortality outcomes compared to other first world nations who took COVID more seriously on a national level, like Japan and South Korea. But we fared a lot better than Russia who probably did the worst in both mitigation and outcomes. Harvard is a massive institution and I strongly doubt anyone outside their medical school was involved in his firing, if he was even fired. You can’t cancel a professor, that’s the point of tenure. But if I had to speculate him and the rest of the biostats faculty at HMS got an offer letter for next academic year saying work more for less, and he smartly balked. But he would not be fired or censured for promoting herd immunity.
Basically, your argument is "Harvard is a massive institution, so it couldn't have happened. Have you been under a rock? Harvard is rotten.
I don’t need Twitter Darling and Billionaire Bill Ackman to tell me how to feel about Harvard. Nor you or anyone else. I have no affinity for anything affiliated with the school and have no issues calling it out for being a hedge fund with a university. But its decline and predicted demise has been greatly over-exaggerated. I am saying any US university would not fire a full professor over promoting herd immunity.
Clearly I didn’t. He says in his ramblings at the end that he was fired for failing to abide by HMS’ own internal vaccination rules. Ones developed by HMS’ ID department, not biostatistics faculty like Kulldorff. That type of behavior both should and does get you fired. Tenure or not. But I still think it is a cop out by him. He is non-clinical faculty, and Harvard has dropped their COVID vaccination requirements this month. If he still wants to work in academics, he will find a new job. But I think he will find this new I was persecuted by Harvard schtick to be his most lucrative yet. Good for him.
No it should not. He had Covid. Your opinion is extremely unscientific, as is the vaccination mandate at Harvard. It is known that natural infection protects better than the vaccine. What is the point of mandating someone to get vaccinated who already had Covid? (Aside from the fact that vaccine mandates are unconstitutional anyway.) Prove any point he makes in his article wrong. Debate me about it.
I already linked the bit about his false report. His information was untrue and full of errors. One death(from flu) isn't more than one thousand (from Covid-19.)
Immunity wanes for SARS-CoV-2. Vaccine or viral induced. This is empirical not theoretical. Harvard has the legal right to set vaccine requirements for its faculty and staff and its faculty can chose to follow them or leave. The reason why Harvard and other organizations had to be draconian about COVID vaccine exemptions was that people were lying about having COVID to avoid getting vaccinated and people who have had COVID still tolerate the vaccine. For most people it’s a Trust MeTM I had it when in reality they had a cold or allergies. In his specific case, his evidence should’ve sufficed for the year after he was treated.
You do understand that the vaccine does not provide sterilizing immunity, yes? The Covid vaccines are for self-protection, not to prevent transmission - which renders mandates pointless (and unconstitutional when federal workers are affected). https://www.texasattorneygeneral.go...strations-vaccine-mandate-federal-contractors P.S.: I am not against vaccines in general, at all. I got three Covid vaccinations. But there is zero point in forcing Covid vaccinations of healthy children who already had Covid.
100% aware that it’s not sterilizing immunity. But neither is the influenza vaccine I am required to get every year. The mRNA vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 reduces severity of symptoms and duration of disease, and for the COVID-19 that was essential for people to feel like they could live their lives safely. https://www.scientificamerican.com/...top-covid-transmission-to-curb-the-pandemic1/
It’s n=1, but I have been able to track my quarterly antibody levels since June 2020 and they were negative until about a month after my second dose. They’d wane over the year and went back up from boosters. I had one quarter of a spike in the 100s while I would’ve been considered protected when I visited Florida and I can only assume that was an asymptomatic infection. No big deal I thought. I was over a year out from my last booster, because I had put it off, when I caught COVID in December. Between fever, delirium, and GI distress, it took 10 full days before I could muster a full days work. Now I am not a biostatistician or an economist, but if I were running a hospital or university I would explicitly not want that in my staff or students.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(22)00801-5/fulltext Interpretation All estimates of protection waned within months against reinfection but remained high and sustained for hospital admission or severe disease. Individuals with hybrid immunity had the highest magnitude and durability of protection, and as a result might be able to extend the period before booster vaccinations are needed compared to individuals who have never been infected.
