Hardly Martin Luther and the Diet of Worms, you might think. But amidst the global crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Great Barrington Declaration has caused epic controversy. This scientists’ petition, calling for a different strategy to manage the novel coronavirus, opposes the group-think that has led to a tightening ratchet on citizens’ liberties with consequent economic carnage.
Campaigners against lockdown are derided as cranks and conspiracy theorists, in contrast to ‘the science’ and compassion of the interventionists. But now the alliance of professional and political orthodoxy is presenting a conspiracy theory of its own: the resistance to Covid constraints is a right-wing putsch against a global consensus on climate science and social progress.
Signed in a village in rural Massachusetts, the Great Barrington Declaration proposes shielding of the vulnerable, while allowing herd immunity to develop naturally among the majority who have low risk. The original signatories are no obscurantists: Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University.
However, Gabriel Scally, a member of the British government’s SAGE committee, dismissed them as ‘fringe experts’. Furthermore, he referred to a minor left-wing website, which smeared the declaration as a scheme of misanthropic motives. The launch was hosted by the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER). Founded in 1933, this think-tank is supported by Charles Koch, one of the brothers whose wealth has kept American academic conservatism alive in a hostile environment. It has been very critical of the anti-capitalist climate change movement.
Scally of SAGE tweeted: –
‘Let’s be clear where the ‘herd immunity’ let-it-rip nonsense that is the Great Barrington ‘big idea’ comes from. It is a product of the US libertarian right. The AIER’s goal is ‘promoting the ideas of pure freedom and private governance’. Covid-19 is their big chance.’
This ‘big chance’, according to the conspiracy theory, will be used to cull the population, and to enrich and empower libertarian extremists. Sounds like a new world order, doesn’t it? This is surely a classic case of projection and lack of insight by the lockdown zealots. The more that we hear from Great Barrington critics, the more it seems that Covid-19 is a tool of the climate alarmists’ agenda.
Political leaders around the world, including Boris Johnson and Democrat presidential challenger Joe Biden, are parroting the slogan ‘Build Back Better’. It’s no secret that this comes from the World Economic Forum, the masters of the universe who fuel eco-revolutionary and Marxist activism to undermine the nation state. In the ‘Great Reset’, democratic systems will be overridden by global decree (the ordinary people are too stupid to know what’s good for them). Health Secretary Matt Hancock recently promoted the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, another WEF concept.
Absurdly, anyone mentioning the globalists’ design is mocked as a conspiracy theorist. Kevin O’Sullivan, a British TalkRadio station host, said ‘there is no Great Reset…it’s just so ridiculous’. Yet Klaus Schwab, WEF leader, openly talks of exploiting chaos to create order, described as the ‘New Normal’. Much of what’s happening today was predicted by Event 201, the desktop exercise by the WEF in 2019. We are rapidly heading towards a technocracy run by an unelected elite, controlling access to banking, travel and employment, and reducing us to digital slaves.
The Great Barrington Declaration has been attacked for countering the medico-political hegemony on Covid-19. As signatures neared two hundred thousand (mostly concerned citizens but also fifteen thousand scientists), Google magically made it disappear. After an outcry it returned, but search results are dominated by scurrilous diatribes against the sponsor and signatories. Anyone relying on Wikipedia would learn from the likes of Scottish government advisor Devi Sridhar (a social anthropologist) that it is not worth any consideration. Reddit banned it from a discussion forum.
Such censorship is what the Nazis, Stalin and Mao did to suppress science and knowledge. Is herd immunity such a reckless goal? Matt Hancock thinks so. In the House of Commons this week he rejected a rethink on the Covid regime, arguing that the Great Barrington Declaration is based on false premises. So a chap with a politics degree knows more than esteemed epidemiologists. Junior health minister Nadine Dorries, who previously practised as a nurse, tweeted ‘there is no such thing as herd immunity’.
In a measured response to Hancock’s scorn, Sunetra Gupta explained the complexity of herd immunity, which is more complex than portrayed by politicians and their scientific advisors. Kulldorff and Bhattacharya were more scathing, noting Hancock’s ignorance in using the example of malaria as evidence against herd immunity. This disease is not transmitted between human beings but by mosquito bite, and it is nothing like a virus. Oncologist Angus Dalgleish remarked: ‘it is shocking that the Health Secretary does not have a basic understanding of infectious disease epidemiology’.
Yet mainstream scientists, politicians and media continue to disparage the Great Barrington Declaration, some resorting to puerile jibes about fake signatories, as if someone signing as ‘Doctor Doolittle’ negates the support of half a million including forty thousand medical practitioners and health scientists. Suppression of a rational scientific argument is justified by Big Tech and the medical authorities by the vague notion of harm. Why is this declaration regarded as so dangerous, and who is really endangered?
I see the Marxist trolls have turned up here.
Don’t you know ? Covid 19 does not exist, it’s a hoax (Piers Corbyn). They say Covid19 symptoms are caused by radiation from the 5G masts. The purpose of the lockdown was to keep everybody indoors while the masts were going up. We will soon be offered a vaccine against Covid19 which will contain a microchip from Bill Gates telling him where we all are and the world will be his. The nurse is late with my medication tonight,but I feel much better now after those nice men in their white coats brought me here. I still wear my tin foil hat in case I get a message from Mr Gates. You can’t be too sure these days can you ?
The Great Barrington Declaration: “Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home.” As the old lady in Yorkshire indicated, are senior citizens to spend the rest of their lives cowering in their homes? I am of a certain age myself and I can see a time coming when I say “What the ****” unless I die first.
Don’t many old people already spend their lives cowering in their homes?
Other old people spend their lives cowering in disgusting “care homes”.
Every successful culture in history admired and respected its old people – the older the better! – but, here in The West, 50 or 60 years of “youth culture” have abolished that.
For those of us who are “of a certain age”, old age will be even worse.
It’s extraordinary how this type of medieval thinking persists. Every plague in history has been attributed to wizards. Today it is Event 201,the WEF and the Masters of the Universe behind Covid 19, just as the Black Death was attributed to either Jews, Catholics, Huguenots etc, or whichever group you blamed for life’s failures.
Funny – I thought the government was blaming us.
The government blames us and we blame the government, but what are we blaming each other for? A much smaller number of “excess deaths” than was originally predicted in order to persuade us to abandon normal life?
If everybody washed his or her hands as often as nice middle-class conservative people already do, and if everybody avoided close contact with strangers the way nice middle-class conservative people already do, there would be no problem. But we live in a country where nice middle-class habits have been ridiculed for so long that they probably can’t be revived.
Wash your hands often.
Keep your distance from strangers.
Problem solved!
Some good stuff in here, but I always have to laugh at the suggestion that the WEF, an organization of the wealthiest capitalists on the planet trying save capitalism in crisis from the top down, is somehow a “Marxist” organization. Think you need to read your Marx again.
They are implementing a version of capitalism that works for them. The last thing they want is an alternative to it that works for the working class.
I don’t see the WEF as essentially Marxist; it is much more in tune with global capitalism (as its name suggests). But there’s no doubt that the globalists are using cultural Marxist movements to undermine the nation state, in preparation for the Great Reset.
Correspondingly, cultural Marxists are trying to exploit globalisation to create Year Zero.
An unholy alliance.
Sorry Niall but I did find your article more than a tad confusing. Trying to cram discussion of too many debatable propositions into too few lines, perhaps.
There are many more questions than answers.
But the WEF video ‘Great Reset’ answers some of them.
The Great Barrington Declaration is ‘noises off’.
Thanks for pointing to the Great Reset – several videos on YouTube. I watched the one fronted by Schwab himself – the personification of Big Brother or a Bond movie villain. Also Sprach Schwab, indeed. An exercise in self-aggrandisement not only by him but all the other boys and girls in the band. Phew.
Re WEF / Marxist tie up. Marx and Engels could be considered a precedent perhaps. And what a double act – although hard to see who was the comedian and who the stooge.
“Marxism” (especially the “Cultural” variety”) and “Global Capitalism” are two sides of the same coin today, just as Communism and Fascism were two sides of a similar coin in the 1930s. They have different answers to supposedly important questions, but they agree in imagining that the questions are worth asking, and the outcome is always many millions of deaths.
The best policy is to have no policy, and and the second best policy is to have a policy that isn’t based on a philosophy. Any policy based on any kind of idea (even a Christian idea) is going to end in killing people.
For me, that’s conservatism.
Marxism needs a working class that is capable of performing all the manufacturing. They need to be not highly educated – just enough to function. Nationalism and Christianity are the enemies of Marxism. Global open borders gets rid of nationalism and Christianity is being killed, assisted by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Marxism always has elites, and they promote themselves.
Marx himself did not work.
Thank you, Niall. It really doesn’t take much to join the dots. What is going on is pure evil. The question is: how long before we get the pitchforks out and set the tumbrils rolling?
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Dear Niall,
An excellent article, and the response from various panjandrums around the world, including our own (ill Named) SAGE committee to The Great Barrington Declaration, is an indication of some degree of paranoia within the ranks of the establishment.
I suspect they fear that too much talk about the emperor’s tunic, might reveal to everyone that he is actually naked.
I note also that China’s economy has grown by 4.9%.
Will the great globalisers remember that it is probable that the virus was produced by the Institute of Virology in Wuhan. Therefore, when the ecomomy that is growing strongly after the WHO created Covid over-reaction, belongs to the same totalitarian country that produced the virus, and the same country that has undue influence over the WHO, shouldn’t the rest of the world’s leaders find that slightly troubling?
What links do the Davos crowd and their Great Reset have with the Chinese Communist Party?
R
Excellent and extremely useful exposition here by Niall McCrae, from big-picture to key details.
Meanwhile, the virus and its consequences have exposed the utter non-competence of the mainstream media in dealing with important matters-
-which, when added to the politicians’ technical weaknesses in such areas, and the anti-freedom propensities of many scientists, doctors, civil service technocrats, and bodies such as WEF, puts us plain folk in extreme danger on many fronts.