SEARCH
The Epoch Times: “Kulldorff & Bhattacharya Respond: The Collins and Fauci Attack on Traditional Public Health”
Related: atherosclerosis, Dr Anthony Fauci, ethics in medicine, gears of the machine, Great Barrington Declaration, health, Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka Coronavirus, statin, The Epoch Times
re: COVID
re: ethics in medicine
re: Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya
re: follow the money
re: Great Barrington Declaration
Spot-on, from two world-class experts. Eventually it will get traction, but half a trillion dollars in profits are a force to be reckoned with—though there is a quick solution.
The Epoch Times: “Kulldorff & Bhattacharya Respond: The Collins and Fauci Attack on Traditional Public Health”
2021-12-31 emphasis added.
On Oct. 4, 2020, with Prof. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). Our purpose was to express our grave concerns over the inadequate protection of the vulnerable and the devastating harms of the lockdown pandemic policy adopted by much of the world; We proposed an alternative strategy of focused protection.
The key scientific fact on which the GBD was based—a more than thousand-fold higher risk of death for the old compared to the young—meant that better protection of the old would minimize COVID deaths. At the same time, opening schools and lifting lockdowns would reduce the collateral harm to the rest of the population.
The Declaration received enormous support, ultimately attracting signatures from over 50,000 scientists and medical professionals and over 800,000 members of the public. Our hope in writing was two-fold. First, we wanted to help the public understand that—contrary to the prevailing narrative—there was no scientific consensus in favor of lockdown. In this, we succeeded.
...
Ignoring the call for focused protection of the vulnerable, Collins and Fauci purposely mischaracterized the GBDl as a “let-it-rip” “herd immunity strategy,” even though focused protection is the very opposite of a let-it-rip strategy. It is more appropriate to call the lockdown strategy that has been followed a “let-it-rip” strategy. Without focused protection, every age group will eventually be exposed in equal proportion, albeit at a prolonged “let-it-drip” pace compared to a do-nothing strategy.
When journalists started asking us why we wanted to “let the virus rip,” we were puzzled. Those words are not in the GBD, and they are contrary to the central idea of focused protection. It is unclear whether Collins and Fauci ever read the GBD, whether they deliberately mischaracterized it, or whether their understanding of epidemiology and public health is more limited than we had thought. In any case, it was a lie.
We were also puzzled by the mischaracterization of the GBD as a “herd immunity strategy.” Herd immunity is a scientifically proven phenomenon, as fundamental in infectious disease epidemiology as gravity is in physics. Every COVID strategy leads to herd immunity, ... It makes as much sense to claim that an epidemiologist is advocating for a “herd immunity strategy” as it does to claim that a pilot is advocating a “gravity strategy” when landing an airplane. The issue is how to land the plane safely, and whatever strategy the pilot uses, gravity ensures that the plane will eventually return to earth.
...We do not know why Collins and Fauci decided to do a “take down” rather than use their esteemed positions to build and promote vigorous scientific discussions on these critical issues, engaging scientists with different expertise and perspectives. Part of the answer may lie in another puzzle—their blindness to the devastating effects of lockdowns on other public health outcomes.
Lockdown harms have affected everyone, with an extra heavy burden on the chronically ill; on children, for whom schools were closed; on the working class, especially those in the densely populated inner cities; and on the globalpoor, with tens of millions suffering from malnutrition and starvation. For example, Fauci was a major advocate for school closures. These are now widely recognized as an enormous mistake that harmed children without affecting disease spread. In the coming years, we must work hard to reverse the damage caused by our misguided pandemic strategy.
... Scientists will naturally hesitate before putting themselves in a situation where the NIH Director, with an annual scientific research budget of $42.9 billion, wants to take them down. It may also be unwise to upset the director of NIAID, with an annual budget of $6.1 billion for infectious disease research, or the director of the Wellcome Trust, with an annual budget of $1.5 billion. Sitting atop powerful funding agencies, Collins, Fauci, and Farrar channel research dollars to nearly every infectious disease epidemiologist, immunologist, and virologist of note in the United States and UK... In academic medicine, landing an NIH grant makes or breaks careers, so scientists have a strong incentive to stay on the right side of NIH and NIAID priorities. If we want scientists to speak freely in the future, we should avoid having the same people in charge of public health policy and medical research funding.
WIND: I see no evidence of Collins and Fauci “blindness to the devastating effects of lockdowns”. That requires them to be either stupid, or intentionally evil and corrupt. And they are not stupid.
Follow the money. Government money inevitably corrupts; it is a mind-altering virus infecting anyone that touches it. Science no longer exists in medicine; it is a massively corrupt industry right up there with the food industry.
The sociopaths are still running the show. Gibbets and crows come to mind.
