[ExI] I signed the Great Barrington Declaration

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2022 at 3:43 PM Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 27, 2022 at 2:43 PM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> see here:
>>
>> https://gbdeclaration.org/
>>
>> Obviously true and yet reviled as "extreme" or even "lunatic", by the
>> extreme lunatics who railroaded our society into a masked,
>> socially-distanced and locked-down insanity.
>>
>>
> "leading to greater excess mortality in years to come"
>
> Do you have reason to believe that wasn't the goal in the first place?
>

### I think the current mess is just the result of millions of headless
chickens running around and pretending they have the answers to Covid,
life, the universe and everything. There is no Dark Design, however there
are lots of dimwits out there.

Here is a bit more of what I posted about the Declaration on another venue:

I think it's useful to focus on how the phrase "herd immunity" is used. I
remember from times before Covid that we talked about herd immunity in the
context of the protection afforded to the vulnerable people
(immunocompromised individuals, the frail and the infirm) by presence of
levels of natural or artificially-acquired (i.e. vaccinated) immunity among
the population as a whole, sufficient to prevent uncontrolled,
outbreak-type spread. Herd immunity doesn't mean a complete immunity of all
people in the community, only enough immunity to prevent epidemic,
uncontrollable spread. For pathogens such as whooping cough, where vaccine
immunity is long-lasting, the preferred means of achieving herd immunity is
vaccinating enough children to prevent outbreaks. For pathogens such as
coronaviruses, which are commonly endemic and tend to produce frequent but
mild reinfections (as it may be eventually the case with Covid-19) it means
doing nothing in particular about infections among the healthy and young
but it may mean special precautions around the Covid-vulnerable persons,
which is exactly what the Declaration advocates. In other words, the
Declaration is actually conventional epidemiological wisdom, applied to a
new pathogen that seems to follow a trajectory similar to multiple previous
pathogens of this kind (e.g. the Russian Flu of 1889). Almost everybody
eventually gets infected and re-infected, multiple times, by most major
strains of common viruses (rhinovirus, RSV, coronaviruses) and trying to
prevent that just is not reasonable.  But it is reasonable to protect the
sick elderly and to develop better vaccines.

This is just old-fashioned, epidemiological common sense. That it is seen
as a dangerous and abominable heterodoxy is a testament to how far off the
beaten path we are now.
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