A sensible and compassionate anti-COVID strategy
Excerpts from a forum Oct. 9 presented by epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattachara.
In March the WHO said 3% of people who get Covid die from it. Today, the fatality rate is known to be in the neighborhood of 0.2%. In the early days, people weren’t identified because many of those infected have mild or no symptoms at all. This leads to a misleading fatality rate. And that is what drove public policy. Even worse, it continues to sow fear and panic, because the perception of too many people about COVID is frozen in the misleading data from March.
Who is At Risk? There is a thousand-fold difference between the mortality rate in people over 70 and the mortality rate of children. This year in the U.S., more children have died from the seasonal flu than from Covid. That has not been taken into account by policymakers. Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.
Deadliness of Lockdowns. The initial rationale was to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. It became clear before long that this was not a worry. In the U.S. and most of the world, hospitals were never at risk for being overwhelmed. Yet the lockdowns were kept in place, with deadly effects. Herd immunity is not a strategy — it is a biological fact that applies to most infectious diseases. We know the people who are vulnerable and those who are not. To continue to act as if we do not know these things makes no sense.
Where to Go from Here. Three epidemiologists (Stanford, Oxford, Harvard) with different disciplinary and political perspectives met and came to the same conclusion: widespread lockdown policy has been a devastating public health mistake. In response, they wrote the Great Barrington Declaration. More than 43,000 medical and public health scientists and medical practitioners have signed it. Members of the general public can also sign the declaration.
When scientists have spoken up against the lockdown policy, there has been enormous pushback and censorship by social and mainstream media. Science can’t do its job in an environment where anyone who challenges the status quo gets shut down or canceled. This is a central part of the scientific debate and it belongs in the debate.
Facts, not fear are needed. In Oregon this Thanksgiving, people are told they will be fined or jailed for having too many people in their own home. And citizens are encouraged to turn in neighbors who are violating this mandate. In nine short months, America is looking more unrecognizable as a nation of liberty.
Although touting “the science” as driving these governmental mandates, reputable scientists have been widely censored from the debate. We need to ask why.
—Jolene Regier is a nurse in Kalispell.