Six years ago in October, three epidemiologists published the Great Barrington Declaration. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard argued for what they called “Focused Protection”: protect those most vulnerable to COVID while allowing those at lower risk to resume normal life. Schools should remain open. Young people should be allowed to work, play sports, and live their lives.
The response was not debate. It was a swift and brutal campaign to discredit them. Francis Collins, who at the time was the director of the National Institutes of Health, emailed Anthony Fauci calling the authors “fringe epidemiologists” and demanding a “quick and devastating published take down” of the Declaration’s premises. Six years later, Bhattacharya holds Collins’s old job as director of the NIH. I’m glad he’s there, but a personnel change is not a reckoning.
I have little confidence that if officials decided to lock us down again — and frightened people enough — Americans would resist. We would forget what happened to children, businesses, institutional trust and basic civil liberties. We would forget how quickly fear made previously unthinkable policie...