To most elegantly capture the idea of why people see the push for The Great Barrington Declaration as having done harm, I want to quote Dr. Jay Bhattacharya one last time in an interview he did with ZdoggMD (edited for clarity):
Dr. Jay: I think there’s two norms that are competing with one another…In public health, you have to have basically some somewhat unified message, right? I mean…if you don’t have that unified message, you can’t be effective.
Dr. Z: It’s very tough. The public doesn’t get the nuance and so on.
Dr. Jay: Yeah. And you’re trying to communicate in a mass way. You’re trying to give them a simple message, as accurately as possible, that’s consistent with the science to get people to act a certain way. I mean, it is essentially a mechanism of population control but a benevolent one, because you’re trying to get people to act for their own health.
Dr. Z: Right. You’re shaping a system so people will walk along a path that makes some sense that’s hopefully proven by data.
Dr. Jay: Right. And so there dissent is dangerous.
This is a quote I agree with wholeheartedly. We know that most countries that did well during the first year of the pandemic were those which had highly coordinated and involved strategies. We also know that trust in government and other people was strongly correlated with success in keeping cases down, and is likely one of the reasons Nordic countries fared well. Working together in a time of crisis is undoubtedly a path to success.
If we’re being honest, there has never been good reason to think that people would ever jump ship on mainstream public health and get on board with the GBD in the heat of the pandemic (during one of the most divisive years in American history). And because the declaration was unable to win public opinion following the first wave despite having strong executive support, I and most others don’t see it as a plan which could ever have done much but create dissent and lessen the efficacy of the one already in place.
Ultimately, the American death rate from COVID was to become one of the worst in the world. Something went wrong here which to the average person seems quite obvious: we let COVID become political. This was not done by Fauci since he had no control over what measures states did or didn’t use. It was done by our media empire which takes every advantage it can to divide us. It kept us from reaching at least a working consensus, as seen in other countries, which meant everything we did would be a half measure.
The authors of the GBD do not run this empire and should not be held liable for it, though it has fairly been pointed out that they would likely have been less divisive had they done science by paper and less often by press release. But they look at our catastrophic failure as a country and use it to further justify their narrative. They thus conflate two very different things: 1) recognition of the ways we could have been less restrictive and still protected ourselves and 2) the feasibility of their plan to deliver such benefits in real-time. I absolutely agree that one is a fair point of inquiry, and if a plan like the GBD had been drafted years in advance and reviewed by formal scientific bodies, then it would have been given its fair due (and something good would have come of it).
That’s not what happened. The authors introduced a controversial plan in the middle of a veritable wildfire of disease and political upheaval. And perhaps that more than anything is why it has become a fixture in the culture war that Americans keep fighting but realize no one can win.