The Great Barrington Declaration

Introduction[edit]

The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) is an entreaty to provide focused protection to people most susceptible to severe illness and/or death from SARS-CoV-2, also known as Covid-19. It was written by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Sunetra Gupta and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and released as a petition to the public on October 5, 2020. As of September 5, 2022, there have been 932,500+ (GBD) signatories including members of the public as well as tens of thousands of physicians and public health experts. There has been as well a huge backlash from partisan activists with no epidemiology background, including many leftist journalists and misinformation concerning actual and historical epidemiology teaching abounds.

What is epidemiology?[edit]

Epidemiology is the study of the transmission and prevalence of infectious disease. The authors of the GBD, and hundreds if not thousands of the signatories are specialist epidemiologists, and alternatively people familiar with the mathematical and/or practical aspects of infectious disease propagation and management. As a practical matter, there are a limited number of things that can be done in a cost effective manner to limit the spread and the effects an epidemic from a quickly mutating respiratory virus, and a much longer list of mistakes one can make. Historically speaking, there is a long list of pyrrhic attempts to use quarantine, from the middle ages until the present day, to obstruct the tidal waves of assorted infections Oxford Textbook of Infectious Disease Control: A Geographical Analysis from Medieval Quarantine to Global Eradication (1). This was as ineffectual in the past, with much more serious epidemics than SARS-CoV-2, as it is in the present. For example, regarding the first quarantine station in modern day Dubrovnik (Italy) in 1377 AD; "Health passports, and restrictions on travel and trade during plague epidemics were added to the surveillance system based on spies and the cordon sanitaire. The procedures developed were largely unsuccessful in their primary aim of preventing the spread of plague, a disease whose aetiology was then unknown." The GBD arose from just such an understanding of what is ineffectual. 207.47.175.199 02:15, September 6, 2022 (EDT)