Why I am not entirely keen on the Great Barrington Declaration and AIER
More people are asking me about my attitudes toward Great Barrington and AIER, including David Henderson in this post (which also has a good transcript of my remarks to Russ Roberts). Earlier I wrote a conceptual critique of the Great Barrington Declaration, but today I would like to make some more targeted remarks. I didn’t do this when speaking to Russ because I feel they require direct quotation and documentation, which one cannot easily do in a podcast. And in general I don’t like to write posts “attacking people” (way oversupplied on the internet), but in this case libertarian sympathies are so split that a kind of a wake-up call is needed.
Let me first say that if you are libertarian, and would like a libertarian response to the pandemic, and you find Alex and me not libertarian enough, read the Ryan Bourne book from the Cato Institute. You may not agree with everything in there, but it has no “gross errors” and no “biomedical weirdness.” And people, the Cato Institute really is libertarian. They once hired David Henderson as chief economist.
As for the AIER, read this Jeremy Horpedahl thread and click through appropriately, here is the Sam Bowman-produced part of the thread. Conspiracy theorist and shall we say “speculative thinker” Naomi Wolf is now a senior researcher at AIER, please do read her tweets. 5G conspiracy theories? Vaccine nanoparticles that make you travel back in time? “Not kidding” she wrote, and the general weirdness extends far beyond that, to some of her books as well. Or try this “externality denialism” from just a few days ago: “Your vaccine status makes no difference to others.” Her pinned tweet casts suspicion on Bill Gates, and refers to “global treason.”
I say it is a mistake to let such a group set the libertarian agenda or indeed any agenda, even if you favor very rapid reopenings and are very critical of lockdowns. I implore you to think very seriously about what is going on here.
Going back to the GBD proper, which again is sponsored by AIER, here is co-author Sunetra Gupta:
“What we’ve seen is that in normal, healthy people, who are not elderly or frail or don’t have comorbidities, this virus is not something to worry about no more than how we worry about flu,” professor Gupta told HT.
Nope, almost 600,000 U.S. deaths later. Or how does this Gupta claim look?:
‘Why would you arrest transmission?’ she asks. ‘To wait for a vaccine? You cannot get rid of it.’
What would Benjamin Netanyahu say? Or Gupta in May: “Covid-19 is on the way out.”
The best of them is probably Jay Bhattacharya, with whom I often agree, and who, as far as I can tell, has no track record of blatantly false predictions. Yet even he cannot avoid a tinge of biomedical weirdness.
Why was Bhattacharya on the advisory board of the anti-vax group Panda? I am reluctant to play the “guilt by association” game here, but I think there is a broader pattern of these writers simply being wrong about the science, and their associations reflecting that.
I agree with his WSJ critique (with Kulldorff) of vaccine passports. Still, he comes up with some literally true but misleading sequences such as:
The idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is as scientifically baseless as the idea that nobody does. Covid vaccines are essential for older, high-risk people and their caretakers and advisable for many others.
I wonder why cannot he bring himself to say that “the average social value of a 16-year-old getting vaccinated is strongly positive”? (And we are running significant tests to lower the remaining uncertainty, and if it is merely adenovirus platforms you worry about well say that.) Instead he has to walk around the issue and play down the value of near-universal Covid vaccination. You might think that is all the fault of the editorial chopping board, but it seems to be a broader and more consistent pattern with this group.
Take Hulldorff’s now-famous tweet “Those with prior natural infection do not need it [Covid vaccines]. Nor children.” “Need?” — OK, I get it, demand curves slope down. But again, his tweet is not nearly as good or as accurate a message as “the average social value of a 16-year-old getting vaccinated is strongly positive.” There is good evidence that the vaccines provide better protection than does natural infection, especially against the Covid variants, and it is established that infected younger persons can carry Covid to the unvaccinated, of which there will always be quite a few, most of all globally. Furthermore, non-vaccine methods of achieving herd immunity are looking worse, due to the spread of variants and areas such as Manaus, which seem to have high rates of reinfection. And have I mentioned that hospitalization rates for the young are rising? (We are not sure why.)
Is it so great that 38.9% of Marines are refusing to take the vaccine? (no). Or have these writers looked into the huge success that is Gibraltar?
Why take this weird, hinky attitude toward the science for no good reason? It’s as if — when it comes to vaccines — they deliberately talk in an Alice in Wonderland universe without self-awareness of that fact.
No matter what your associations may or may not be, getting people vaccinated with quality vaccines is the #1 issue right now and it is the path back to liberty most likely to succeed and prove sustainable. If you are not really enthusiastic about that, I think, frankly, that you are out to lunch.