Two Years After Experts Criticized Lockdowns and COVID Restrictions, They've Been Proven Right

It's the two year anniversary of the Great Barrington Declaration, which will go down in history as one of the most important documents of the COVID pandemic.

It’ll provide proof that not every expert unquestioningly accepted prevailing narratives on how best to approach the pandemic.

The Great Barrington Declaration was essentially an open letter created and spearheaded by three world renowned infectious disease experts, Dr. Martin Kulldorff at Harvard University, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta from Oxford University.

All three are extremely credentialed and qualified to speak about COVID debates, with backgrounds in epidemiology, immunology and health policy.

Their focus was to create an alternative to the endless lockdowns, restrictions, school closures, contact tracing and isolation policies of 2020, as they explain:

"The Declaration was written from a global public health and humanitarian perspective, with special concerns about how the current COVID-19 strategies are forcing our children, the working class and the poor to carry the heaviest burden.  The response to the pandemic in many countries around the world, focused on lockdowns, contact tracing and isolation, imposes enormous unnecessary health costs on people. In the long run, it will lead to higher COVID and non-COVID mortality than the focused protection plan."

From left to right, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Dr. Sunetra Gupta and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, photographed during the creation of the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, which decried lockdowns.

In a sane world, you'd think that when three eminently qualified experts with experience in infectious diseases take the time to work together and create a letter expressing their substantial concerns with public health policy, the media and influential individuals would take notice and take their issues seriously.

But unfortunately, sanity has been in short supply since the pandemic started.

The partisan "experts" who ran the U.S.'s COVID response, like the former head of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, conspired to label them, misrepresent their plans, and run a campaign of disinformation to discredit them.

Instead of engaging with their ideas, inviting them to discuss their thoughts and take their opinions into account, Collins called three doctors from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford "fringe epidemiologists."

Why Did No One Listen?

What was so dangerous about their plan?

They wanted to focus mitigation measures on those most vulnerable, while allowing those at little to no risk of serious complications from the virus to live as normally, building up immunity through natural infection.

That was simply unacceptable and intolerable to Collins, Deborah Birx, and Dr. Fauci, whose awe-inspiring arrogance, ego, and lack of humility meant that any criticism of their already-failed policies must not be allowed.

Collins and his allies claimed that hundreds of thousands would have died if the US had listened to the Great Barrington Declaration, except of course that hundreds of thousands died while listening to his preferred mandates, and his and Fauci's policies.

Their recommendations annihilated the economic and mental health of the country, and the world, while failing to accomplish anything with regards to disease control.

The Fauci/Birx/Collins/CDC lockdowns and masks did nothing to reduce infections or deaths, while harming tens of millions in the process.

The media, instead of pointing this out, has covered up for their political compatriots while ignoring the inarguable truth that the organizers of the Great Barrington Declaration were inarguably correct.

Even now, they continue with bizarre conspiracy theories and woefully inept analysis:

Focused protection was the only possible solution to the COVID problem; minimizing the ancillary harms to children and healthy adults while trying to mitigate the harms of the virus to the elderly and immunocompromised.

The success of places like Sweden, who implemented something similar and had some of the best results of any country in Europe, and Florida, with similar age-adjusted COVID mortality to lockdown and mask-obsessed California, proved them right.

Meanwhile New York, New Jersey, Peru, the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy and many others followed lockdowns and masking, with no discernible benefits in mortality rates.

Two years later, the closing paragraph of the declaration reads like a remarkably prescient playbook of what world governments should have done:

"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."

In stark contrast to Fauci's predictions of doom in Florida, they were immediately proven right.

Endless college masking, the massive harms from school closures and a seemingly permanent state of emergency in states like California point to the futility of the Collins, Fauci and CDC model.

By trying to protect everyone, we protected no one and hurt others in the process.

The Great Barrington Declaration tried to fix that. Had society listened, we'd be much better off now. Instead, we can only lament that fewer people realized that they were right then, right later, and right now.