5 ms·

This critique is by one of the authors of the Great Barrington declaration who argued to just let COVID rip through the entire population before there were vacc

by jupp0r 3y ago

This critique is by one of the authors of the Great Barrington declaration who argued to just let COVID rip through the entire population before there were vaccines, so take that with a grain of salt too.

flybrand 3y ago
That is explicitly not what they argued for and is a misrepresentation of ‘focused protection.’ Plus, wouldn’t a reasonable critique not matter who wrote it?
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago
  Critiques of Regime Thought come from non-approved sources.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  > Plus, wouldn’t a reasonable critique not matter who wrote it? Of course, but one problem with scientific critiques like this is that they are written towards laymen (this is on Twitter) who probably don’t have the understanding of whether a critique is reasonable or not. So the identity of the person who is performing the critique does have value in that context. In a true peer review scenario it shouldn’t be that way, scientific critiques should be evaluated on their merits alone.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - superooled 3y ago
    This is also an excellent argument for why we should not unthinkingly trust statements from governments, given the tools of social manipulation they have available.
- Spivak 3y ago
  The declaration is only a few paragraphs long and most of it is filler. The meat of the plan is let covid rip through the population, anything else misrepresents the goal of herd immunity. You can't build up natural immunity without transmission. The biggest flaw with this plan was that you can get infected with the now large family of viruses grouped into "covid" more than once. People don't actually build up as much immunity as the declaration presumes. The second biggest flaw was that there is zero chance you could protect only the high-risk populations. In the US the plan ended up being basically this but s/virus/vaccine/ because the vaccine gave stronger guarantees on avoiding transmission to high-risk groups but then that got weirdly political for some reason. If it was smallpox I bet those same people would have been breaking down the door for an "experimental" vaccine.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - nradov 3y ago
    That is medical misinformation. While reinfections do occur, symptoms are typically less severe. Recovered patients retain a substantial level of immunity, even against newer variants. https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/ https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/ The mRNA vaccines used in the USA are very effective at preventing severe symptoms. However they have only limited and temporary benefit in reducing transmission.
HideousKojima 3y ago
>The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection. From the actual Great Barrington Declaration. Much different than "let it rip through the entire population."
orblivion 3y ago
If anyone is going to have the incentive to poke at this claim, it's going to be someone like him. I don't have any hope that there are unbiased players here, so I'm glad someone's trying to poke holes in arguments coming from the other side.
gotoeleven 3y ago
Yeah so a guy who took a completely correct position even though it was extremely unpopular to do so at the time? Also this characterization of the barrington declaration is quite inaccurate.
- DocSavage 3y ago
  Completely correct? GBD advocated letting SARS-CoV-2 rip through the general pop BEFORE vaccines while "targeting" protection of the elderly, which of course no country managed to do, particularly their poster-child Sweden. Now GBD fans pretend Sweden was a success story when any observation of the COVID impact on Sweden vs their neighbors through the vaccine rollout shows a completely different story. (Sweden had ~10x death rate of bordering Norway for first year of pandemic.) Also GBD pretends mortality is the only worthy metric. There's such a thing as morbidity as the millions of people with Long COVID would like to discuss. But Bhattacharya and friends with strong connection to Hoover Inst have a particularly nice revisionist view of their early work: * Go on Fox and other media to downplay SARS-CoV-2 before we even know what's going on. * Write seroprevalence papers with suspect specificity (changed between v1 and v2 of pre-print due to outrage from stat experts) that don't describe how the visual tests were interpreted, why they differ from the CZI BioHub paper's measurement of the Premiere test, or why a pathologist running ELISA tests to verify wanted off the paper. * Stand by while friends like Scott Atlas make a media tour saying the seroprevalence paper suggests as many as 10,000 dead from COVID. Thus a fair portion of our population decides COVID is just the flu, and some of the GBD supporters still think it's "just a cold" despite the incredible evidence we have that it's much much worse (for example, see Iwasaki's work) and there's the little matter of over 1 million Americans dead. * Then write the GBD before we have the vaccine or have any real public effort to try to protect the elderly. On the bright side, Bhattacharya has been a proponent of the vax and many people (including me) agreed that targeted protection of elderly was very important. It's just that the revisionist commentary from his supporters is they were the only ones saying it. Completely false.
  - slaw 3y ago
    Yes. Completely correct, you are wrong. > Sweden’s Covid death rate among lowest in Europe, despite avoiding strict lockdowns https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/swedens-death-rate-among-lowest-europe-despite-avoiding-strict/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
tomp 3y ago
Do you have a real argument (i.e. attacking the author's claims?) or just ad hominem?
- kevingadd 3y ago
  "ad hominem" is an attack on a person instead of the positions they take. The post you're replying to quite literally is discussing the person's position on COVID which would naturally influence their COVID-related work.
  - omginternets 3y ago
    “Discussing the person’s position” starts with discussing their reasoning. You don’t get to take the conclusion that someone has reached as a basis for dismissing the reasoning that led them there.
    - giraffe_lady 3y ago
      [flagged]
- woodpanel 3y ago
  after all, wasn‘t „ad hominem“ more or less the overall strategy towards any criticism of a country’s covid policy?
  - spookthesunset 3y ago
    Well, that and an appeal to authority. The entire narrative depended on appeals to “the experts”. Where “the experts” were the doomiest of doomsday “experts”. Anything other that “covid is literally the only problem we need to solve for” was all that was allowed. If you dared to question “the experts” and their idiotic plans you were immediately tossed into the alt-right wacko bucket. Didn’t matter what your credentials were or anything. Only doomsday “experts” were allowed a voice. To this day I still can’t believe how many people went along with that crap for almost three years.
  - 3y ago
mvdtnz 3y ago
In retrospect doesn't the experience of places like Florida back this claim?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jupp0r 3y ago
  Depends on your metric. When saving human life is important to you, Florida did much worse than states with more effective interventions [1]. [1]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_final/COVID19.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_...
omginternets 3y ago
Ignoring your gross misrepresentation of the Great Barrington declaration, one might ask why you aren’t commenting on the scientific merit of his critique, but rather shouting “wrong team!”
- drewbug01 3y ago
  Another way of reading this other than “wrong team” (which is itself a culture-war-centric comment to make)… is “this person has stupid ideas, so this idea might be stupid too.” (Whether or not the idea is, in fact, stupid is not my point - rather, you choose to read a culture war into it but there are other ways to read it.)
  - omginternets 3y ago
    The non-culture-war approach would have been to enumerate the author's ideas and show why they are stupid. We are left to deduce this is a knee-jerk "wrong team" response.
- jupp0r 3y ago
  Are you saying that GBD did not want to let people get infected with COVID?
  - omginternets 3y ago
    No, I’m suggesting there was a reasoning behind why he thought this was preferable to the lockdowns.
dadjoker 3y ago
That is an outright lie, and IMO the past three years have shown in many ways their approach was the right one.
spookthesunset 3y ago
The GBD was right though. Society did the absolute opposite of what every single pandemic plan called for. It takes an insane amount of privilege to look at what took place and think it was a good idea.
- jupp0r 3y ago
  No they were wrong. Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved.

by jupp0r 3y ago

flybrand 3y ago

That is explicitly not what they argued for and is a misrepresentation of ‘focused protection.’ Plus, wouldn’t a reasonable critique not matter who wrote it?

Slava_Propanei 3y ago
Critiques of Regime Thought come from non-approved sources.
SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
> Plus, wouldn’t a reasonable critique not matter who wrote it? Of course, but one problem with scientific critiques like this is that they are written towards laymen (this is on Twitter) who probably don’t have the understanding of whether a critique is reasonable or not. So the identity of the person who is performing the critique does have value in that context. In a true peer review scenario it shouldn’t be that way, scientific critiques should be evaluated on their merits alone.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- superooled 3y ago
  This is also an excellent argument for why we should not unthinkingly trust statements from governments, given the tools of social manipulation they have available.
Spivak 3y ago
The declaration is only a few paragraphs long and most of it is filler. The meat of the plan is let covid rip through the population, anything else misrepresents the goal of herd immunity. You can't build up natural immunity without transmission. The biggest flaw with this plan was that you can get infected with the now large family of viruses grouped into "covid" more than once. People don't actually build up as much immunity as the declaration presumes. The second biggest flaw was that there is zero chance you could protect only the high-risk populations. In the US the plan ended up being basically this but s/virus/vaccine/ because the vaccine gave stronger guarantees on avoiding transmission to high-risk groups but then that got weirdly political for some reason. If it was smallpox I bet those same people would have been breaking down the door for an "experimental" vaccine.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nradov 3y ago
  That is medical misinformation. While reinfections do occur, symptoms are typically less severe. Recovered patients retain a substantial level of immunity, even against newer variants. https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/ https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/ The mRNA vaccines used in the USA are very effective at preventing severe symptoms. However they have only limited and temporary benefit in reducing transmission.

HideousKojima 3y ago

>The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection. From the actual Great Barrington Declaration. Much different than "let it rip through the entire population."

orblivion 3y ago

If anyone is going to have the incentive to poke at this claim, it's going to be someone like him. I don't have any hope that there are unbiased players here, so I'm glad someone's trying to poke holes in arguments coming from the other side.

gotoeleven 3y ago

Yeah so a guy who took a completely correct position even though it was extremely unpopular to do so at the time? Also this characterization of the barrington declaration is quite inaccurate.

DocSavage 3y ago
Completely correct? GBD advocated letting SARS-CoV-2 rip through the general pop BEFORE vaccines while "targeting" protection of the elderly, which of course no country managed to do, particularly their poster-child Sweden. Now GBD fans pretend Sweden was a success story when any observation of the COVID impact on Sweden vs their neighbors through the vaccine rollout shows a completely different story. (Sweden had ~10x death rate of bordering Norway for first year of pandemic.) Also GBD pretends mortality is the only worthy metric. There's such a thing as morbidity as the millions of people with Long COVID would like to discuss. But Bhattacharya and friends with strong connection to Hoover Inst have a particularly nice revisionist view of their early work: * Go on Fox and other media to downplay SARS-CoV-2 before we even know what's going on. * Write seroprevalence papers with suspect specificity (changed between v1 and v2 of pre-print due to outrage from stat experts) that don't describe how the visual tests were interpreted, why they differ from the CZI BioHub paper's measurement of the Premiere test, or why a pathologist running ELISA tests to verify wanted off the paper. * Stand by while friends like Scott Atlas make a media tour saying the seroprevalence paper suggests as many as 10,000 dead from COVID. Thus a fair portion of our population decides COVID is just the flu, and some of the GBD supporters still think it's "just a cold" despite the incredible evidence we have that it's much much worse (for example, see Iwasaki's work) and there's the little matter of over 1 million Americans dead. * Then write the GBD before we have the vaccine or have any real public effort to try to protect the elderly. On the bright side, Bhattacharya has been a proponent of the vax and many people (including me) agreed that targeted protection of elderly was very important. It's just that the revisionist commentary from his supporters is they were the only ones saying it. Completely false.
- slaw 3y ago
  Yes. Completely correct, you are wrong. > Sweden’s Covid death rate among lowest in Europe, despite avoiding strict lockdowns https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/swedens-death-rate-among-lowest-europe-despite-avoiding-strict/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...

tomp 3y ago

Do you have a real argument (i.e. attacking the author's claims?) or just ad hominem?

kevingadd 3y ago
"ad hominem" is an attack on a person instead of the positions they take. The post you're replying to quite literally is discussing the person's position on COVID which would naturally influence their COVID-related work.
- omginternets 3y ago
  “Discussing the person’s position” starts with discussing their reasoning. You don’t get to take the conclusion that someone has reached as a basis for dismissing the reasoning that led them there.
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    [flagged]
woodpanel 3y ago
after all, wasn‘t „ad hominem“ more or less the overall strategy towards any criticism of a country’s covid policy?
- spookthesunset 3y ago
  Well, that and an appeal to authority. The entire narrative depended on appeals to “the experts”. Where “the experts” were the doomiest of doomsday “experts”. Anything other that “covid is literally the only problem we need to solve for” was all that was allowed. If you dared to question “the experts” and their idiotic plans you were immediately tossed into the alt-right wacko bucket. Didn’t matter what your credentials were or anything. Only doomsday “experts” were allowed a voice. To this day I still can’t believe how many people went along with that crap for almost three years.
- 3y ago

mvdtnz 3y ago

In retrospect doesn't the experience of places like Florida back this claim?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jupp0r 3y ago
Depends on your metric. When saving human life is important to you, Florida did much worse than states with more effective interventions [1]. [1]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_final/COVID19.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_...

omginternets 3y ago

Ignoring your gross misrepresentation of the Great Barrington declaration, one might ask why you aren’t commenting on the scientific merit of his critique, but rather shouting “wrong team!”

drewbug01 3y ago
Another way of reading this other than “wrong team” (which is itself a culture-war-centric comment to make)… is “this person has stupid ideas, so this idea might be stupid too.” (Whether or not the idea is, in fact, stupid is not my point - rather, you choose to read a culture war into it but there are other ways to read it.)
- omginternets 3y ago
  The non-culture-war approach would have been to enumerate the author's ideas and show why they are stupid. We are left to deduce this is a knee-jerk "wrong team" response.
jupp0r 3y ago
Are you saying that GBD did not want to let people get infected with COVID?
- omginternets 3y ago
  No, I’m suggesting there was a reasoning behind why he thought this was preferable to the lockdowns.

dadjoker 3y ago

That is an outright lie, and IMO the past three years have shown in many ways their approach was the right one.

spookthesunset 3y ago

The GBD was right though. Society did the absolute opposite of what every single pandemic plan called for. It takes an insane amount of privilege to look at what took place and think it was a good idea.

jupp0r 3y ago
No they were wrong. Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved.