COVID Lockdown Skeptics Vindicated

COVID Lockdown Skeptics Vindicated

– By Howard Sierer –

A small but highly competent number of epidemiologists and public health professionals correctly diagnosed COVID primarily as a threat to older people immediately after its appearance in this country. Hence, government-mandated society-wide lockdowns and especially school closures were ineffective and did far more damage than good.  For taking their principled stand, they were censured by government officials and the compliant liberal media who did all they could to discredit and silence them.

One of those epidemiologists, Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, wrote an op-ed in March 2020 titled “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?” citing data that showed 10 to 100 more people were carrying the COVID virus than had actually developed symptoms.

Bhattacharya’s conclusion: “Policy makers will need to focus on reducing risks for older adults and people with underlying medical conditions. A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health.”

His recommendation has now been vindicated by subsequent COVID research and he will be nominated by Pres. Trump to fill the shoes of one of his government tormentors. (Note: neither this writer or Dr. Bhattacharya endorses the anti-vaccine views of Robert Kennedy, nominated by Trump to become Secretary of Health and Human Services.)

Following up in October 2020,  Dr. Bhattacharya led a group of forty-six distinguished epidemiologists and public health professionals from around the world who met in Great Barrington, MA. They expressed “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.“ They issued the Great Barrington Declaration as a call for governments to reconsider its policies and practices for responding to the pandemic.

The U.S. federal government and many state governments had adopted policies to lockdown the economy and public facilities to limit person-to-person contact to halt COVID’s spread. This response was based on recommendations by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. Fauci and other officials believed that opposition to lockdowns was dangerous to public health and worked to stifle the Great Barrington Declaration and any voices that opposed their recommendations.

Convinced they were right, Fauci and the others refused to change course. Francis Collins, then National Institute of Health director and Fauci’s boss, called Dr. Bhattacharya and his colleagues “fringe epidemiologists” in an October 2020 email to  Fauci, in which Dr. Collins called for “a quick and devastating published take down” of the declaration. (Dr. Collins has since acknowledged that his own view of Covid was “very narrow.”)

Fauci told the Washington Post, “This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.” His message spread and the alternative strategy was dismissed. Yet the dissenting researchers weren’t fringe and neither was their opposition to quarantining society. But in the panic over the virus, Fauci and Collins used their authority to stigmatize dissenters and crush debate.

Administration officials called mainstream media outlets including Facebook, and told them off-the-record that they needed take down any and all dissenting voices in the interest of public health. Exposed only recently, these calls were clearly blatant violations of the First Amendment. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook- and Instagram-parent Meta, told Congress in 2024 that his firm was pressured by the Biden administration to censor COVID-related content in 2021. He stated he felt this pressure was wrong and that he regretted complying.

What made America’s scientists decide to play God in this manner? Bhattacharya – himself a victim of their divine wrath – believes that it was the result of “a relatively small group of scientists during the pandemic deciding that any dissent against their ideas was so dangerous that they weren’t going to permit it.” This led to a “groupthink that is anathema to science. It’s also anathema to civil society.”

It was anathema to civil society in two fundamental ways: first, “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” is explicitly prohibited in the Constitution’s First Amendment, and second, the public’s faith in government has been shaken to the core, making dealing with any future national health emergency much more difficult.

Vindication for Dr. Bhattacharya comes with Pres.-elect Trump’s plan to nominate him as director of the National Institutes of Health, the position formerly held by Francis Collins, the very man who had called him a “fringe epidemiologist.” Bhattacharya is well qualified and his nomination is a step toward re-establishing the institute’s credibility.

Bhattacharya says he will “rebalance the portfolio of the NIH so that it emphasizes newer ideas that have the potential for huge breakthroughs.” He will also favor studying “the real health risks that Americans face, like heart and cardiovascular disease and cancer.” He believes those diseases aren’t funded “nearly in the proportions they need, relative to infectious disease and that improvements there have the potential to impact the lives of many people.

Any reform of America’s scientific institutions, Bhattacharya says, must ensure that they “work for the people again.” Instead of “this haughty relationship, where the scientists sit above the public and say, ‘Look, you can’t think that,’ or ‘You’ll be censored if you say that,’ they need to remember that they are servants of the American people.

Trump plans to make several controversial nominations but this is not one of them. Having favorably reviewed the Great Barrington Declaration in a previous column, I fully support one of its authors and have full confidence that he will find broad support in Congress and the public.