Great Barrington Declaration

Signed by Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, it was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial.^[6][7][8] The declaration was drafted in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, signed there on 4 October 2020, and published on 5 October.^[2][9] At the time, COVID-19 vaccines were considered to be months away from general availability.^[4] The document presumed that the disease burden of mass infection could be tolerated, that any infection would confer long term sterilizing immunity, and it made no mention of physical distancing, masks, contact tracing,^[10] or long COVID, which has left patients with debilitating symptoms months after the initial infection.^[11][12]


The World Health Organization (WHO) and numerous academic and public-health bodies stated that the strategy would be dangerous and lacked a sound scientific basis.^[13][14] They said that it would be challenging to shield all those who are medically vulnerable, leading to a large number of avoidable deaths among both older people and younger people with pre-existing health conditions,^[15][16] and warned that the long-term effects of COVID-19 were still not fully understood.^[14][17] Moreover, the WHO said that the herd immunity component of the proposed strategy is undermined by the unknown duration of post-infection immunity.^[14][17] They said that the more likely outcome would be recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination.^[16] The American Public Health Association and 13 other public-health groups in the United States warned in a joint open letter that the "Great Barrington Declaration is not grounded in science and is dangerous".^[13] The Great Barrington Declaration received support from some scientists, the Donald Trump administration, British Conservative politicians, and from The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

Background and content

The idea to issue a declaration came from a conference run by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).^[18] Gupta, one of the authors, said that given journals’ reluctance to publish on herd immunity and that the authors had been "repeatedly dismissed as fringe or pseudoscience" an open letter was chosen as the publication route out of necessity.^[1]


The declaration says that lockdowns have adverse effects on physical and mental health, for example, because people postpone preventive healthcare.^[19] They propose reducing these harms by ending mandatory restrictions on most activities for most people. Without these restrictions, more people will develop COVID-19. They believe that these infections will produce herd immunity (the idea that when enough people become immune, then the virus will stop circulating widely), which will eventually make it less likely that high-risk people will be exposed to the virus.^[19]


The authors say that, instead of protecting everyone, the focus should instead be on "shielding" those most at risk, with few mandatory restrictions placed on the remainder of the population.^[19] Stanford epidemiologist Yvonne Maldonado said that 40% of Americans have an elevated risk of dying from COVID-19, so this would require keeping the 40% of people with known risk factors away from the 60% of people without known risk factors.^[20] In practice, such shielding is impossible to achieve.^[3]


The declaration names specific economic changes that the signatories favour: resuming "life as normal", with schools and universities open for in-person teaching and extracurricular activities, re-opening offices, restaurants, and other places of work, and resuming mass gatherings for cultural and athletic activities. By October 2020, many of these things had already happened in some parts of the world,^[9] but likewise were being restricted elsewhere; for instance the UK saw quarantines of students, travel advisories, restrictions on meeting other people, and partial closures of schools, pubs and restaurants.^[21]


The declaration does not provide practical details about who should be protected or how they can be protected.^[9] For instance, it does not mention testing any people outside of nursing homes, contact tracing, wearing masks, or social distancing.^[9] It mentions multi-generational households but does not provide any information about how, for example, low-risk people can get infected without putting high-risk members of their household at risk of dying.^[9]


The declaration does not provide any references to published data that support the declaration's strategy.^[10]