Drs. Battacharya, Kulldorff, and Gupta co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration and published this in October 2020. The declaration, which was signed by thousands of scientists and physicians, including Nobel Prize Laureate William Leavitt (chemistry) acknowledged that zero Covid was impossible and stressed the more than thousandfold greater danger for the elderly than for children and young adults. It proposed focusing protection on those at high risk of serious disease and allowing the rest of the population to work, live, go to school, while taking sensible precautions like wearing masks where appropriate and staying home if you were sick. Remember,this was before vaccines were available and the country was reeling from lockdowns and closures of schools and businesses. The mainstream media labeled the GBD a “let it rip” proposal to allow the virus to spread unimpeded. Dr. Francis Collins, Head of the National Institutes of Health, in a private email to Dr. Anthony Fauci, which was later made public under FOIA, called the three “fringe scientists” and recommended that they be subjected to a “devastating public take down”.
It is especially ironic that neither Collins or Fauci has any background in public health policy or epidemiology. Neither do Deborah Birx or Robert Redfield who, together with Fauci and Collins were the biggest proponents of the lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, and, later, vaccine mandates. They also inexplicably ignored natural immunity choosing to divide the country into a simplistic binary of vaccinated versus unvaccinated. In promoting these previously unthinkable measures, they copied the totalitarian policies of the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP only recently gave up its zero Covid policies and began to open their society, with the predictable result of a wave of Covid illnesses and millions of deaths in a population that was both largely unvaccinated and had never been exposed to the virus.
Yep, Jay Battacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Suneta Gupta. “Fringe scientists” all. To their names, we can add a host of other thoughtful, highly-credentialed scientists and doctors who opposed the disastrous, Draconian Covid policies of the public health bureaucrats and were ignored, demonized, or cancelled: John Ioannidis, Monica Gandhi, Marty Makary, Vinay Prasad, Zubin Damania, Paul Offit, Scott Atlas, Pierre Kory, and the list goes on………………..
For three years we put up with the insanity of Fauci and company’s Covid mismangement. We cannot let this ever happen again.
Richard T. Bosshardt, MD, FACS