Focused Protection From the Great Barrington Declaration Never Made Sense

Why Focused Protection was never a real strategy for reducing the impact of Covid-19

Due to the recent nomination of one of the authors as NIH director, I thought I’d republish this pre-Substack piece from 2022 on the Great Barrington Declaration. The piece looks at the strategy of “focused protection”, and why it was incredibly misleading and to a great extent pseudoscientific at the time the GBD came out.

Many of the supporters of Dr. Bhattacharya argue that we should focus mostly on the general ideas behind the GBD. The document, as the argument goes, was just trying to limit the damage of government interventions.

Personally, I think it’s important to look not just at vibes, but at the actual public statements people made. There are anti-restriction libertarians who I largely agree with in terms of data, but disagree with in terms of what that data represented. The GBD, however, fundamentally required a different reality from the one that we all live in, where things like separating everyone over 60 years old from the rest of the population were not just possible but reasonable suggestions.

I’ve locked this piece for paid subscribers as it was free on Medium for 2 years. You can still access it there as well by creating an account.