MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-10-25 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Lockdown resistence by Epidimiologist being
|
https://www.wsj.com/articles/epidemiologists-stray-from-the-covid-herd-11603477330?mod=trending_now_pos4
wsj.com
Opinion | Epidemiologists Stray From the Covid Herd
Tunku Varadarajan
11-14 minutes
The Covid rebels make an unlikely pair. Jay Bhattacharya was born in
Kolkata, an Indian city that pulsates with people. Martin Kulldorff is
from Umeå, Sweden, population 90,000. Yet they have much in common. “I
almost view Martin like a brother,” says the talkative Dr. Bhattacharya,
52, who moved to the U.S. with his Bengali parents when he was 4. “I
mean, we complete each other’s sentences, as you can see.” The feeling
is “mutual,” confirms the more phlegmatic Mr. Kulldorff, 58.
Dr. Bhattacharya, a physician and economist, and Mr. Kulldorf, a
biostatistician—who study epidemiology at the medical schools at
Stanford and Harvard, respectively—are, in the eyes of their critics,
dangerous contrarians for opposing Covid-19 lockdowns. Some of the
criticism borders on hysteria: A colleague accused Mr. Kulldorff of
practicing “Trumpian epidemiology” after he gave an interview to the
far-left Jacobin magazine in which he called for a “radically different”
approach to pandemic management.
Most pertinently, the two men are the authors—with Sunetra Gupta, a
professor of epidemiology at Oxford—of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Published on Oct. 4, the declaration is a cri de coeur against lockdowns
and other economic restrictions that have hobbled swaths of the world.
It asked instead for “focused protection”—a policy of allowing “those at
minimal risk of death” to resume their lives while societies concentrate
on “better protecting those who are at highest risk.”
I interview the two men jointly by Zoom—Dr. Bhattacharya in California,
Mr. Kulldorff in Massachusetts. The former speaks of a “systematic media
campaign” against the declaration. He says Google “shadow banned” the
text in the days after it was published. “If you typed in ‘Great
Barrington Declaration,’ what would happen is that the actual website
would appear on the second or third page, buried under a whole long list
of negative stories.” (The matter has since been resolved, he says.)
I discover a similar problem with “herd immunity,” which the declaration
sets out as the end point to be reached after societies have minimized
“mortality and social harm.” On the morning of our interview, I search
Google for “herd immunity” and find that the three links highlighted by
the search engine as “Top Stories” are uniformly negative.
“The politicization of Covid,” Mr. Kulldorff says, “is extremely
unfortunate. People automatically assume what your political beliefs are
based on your views on the pandemic. This is very strange, in my mind.”
Dr. Bhattacharya adds that “the traditional markers for political
identity have absolutely no meaning” in the context of Covid.
Illustrating the point, Mr. Kulldorff says he has defended Sweden’s
Social Democratic government, which “kept schools open against enormous
international criticism,” criticized the British Conservative government
for its lockdown, praised the Republican governor of South Dakota for
her open-for-business policies, and criticized the pro-lockdown
Republican governor of Massachusetts, where he lives. “I must be very
split-minded,” he chuckles, “because in one place I’m a socialist, in
another I’m a conservative.”
Dr. Bhattacharya cites an example of Covid politics that he found
“shocking.” When Black Lives Matter protests broke out in the spring,
“1,300 epidemiologists signed a letter saying that the gatherings were
consistent with good public health practice.” The “same epidemiologists”
were arguing that “we should essentially quarantine in place.” In his
view, this opened up the letter’s signers to “appropriate criticism,
that they’d asked people to shut down their businesses, stay out of
schools, stop worshiping, and yet they’re saying it’s OK to protest. It
just reeked of political bias.”
Mr. Kulldorf won’t tell me what his politics are “until this pandemic is
over.” A public-health scientist, he says, has to work without “infusing
his beliefs.” But Dr. Bhattacharya is happy to say he skews
“center-right.” (Both men have written for these pages.) Dr.
Bhattacharya says Covid has taught him that he shares values “with
people with very, very different political stripes than me. Martin is
certainly a great example of this, probably the prime example.”
What unites the two men is their revulsion against the “current Covid
policy.” This policy “violates every single value I hold dear,” Dr.
Bhattacharya says. “Every single one.” Elaborating, he says he accords
paramount importance—“derived, in my case, from Rawlsian and Christian
commitments”—to the protection of the vulnerable and the poor world-wide
from “avoidable death and suffering.” The lockdowns have “manifestly
failed to do this by inducing economic collapse that has placed the
lives of 130 million poor people world-wide at risk of starvation.”
He also values “the norms of medical ethics that militate against doing
harm to patients.” The current lockdown policy, in his telling, asks
children and young adults—“who face more medical and psychological risk
from the lockdowns than they do from Covid infection”—to accept this
harm “in the false hope that this sacrifice will protect the vulnerable
people.”
Mr. Kulldorff describes lockdowns as “the worst assault on the working
class in half a century—the worst assault since segregation and the
Vietnam War.” Present policies are protecting “very low-risk college
students and very low-risk professionals—attorneys, bankers, journalists
like you, scientists like me—because basically we can work from home.”
(Working at home hasn’t been a hardship for either man, though Dr.
Bhattacharya’s life became much easier after he persuaded a neighbor
that it was safe for his young son to play outdoors with the
Bhattacharya children. Mr. Kulldorff’s biggest worry isn’t Covid; it’s
his 18-year-old son driving the family car.)
In contrast to privileged professionals, Mr. Kulldorff says, the
blue-collar class is “out there working, including high-risk people in
their 60s. So the working class is building up the population immunity
that will eventually protect all of us.” Dr. Bhattacharya adds that one
of the reasons “minority populations have had higher mortality in the
U.S. from the epidemic is because they don’t often have the option—even
if they’re older or have co-morbid conditions—to stay at home.”
Lockdown policies are not only “regressive,” with their disparate impact
on the poor and minorities; they reflect, Dr. Bhattacharya says, a “sort
of monomania.” The world “panicked in March, and the focus came to just
be on Covid control and nothing else.” People saw pictures from Wuhan,
China, and Bergamo, Italy, and concluded that they had to do “something
very, very drastic in order to address this drastic thing that’s
happening.” There was “an action bias that led to the adoption of
lockdowns as a form of contagion itself.” (There is an academic paper
that models the lockdown-contagion idea, titled “Explaining the
homogenous diffusion of Covid-19 nonpharmaceutical interventions across
heterogeneous countries.”)
Mr. Kulldorff says the Covid-19 restrictions violate two cardinal
principles of public health. First, “you can’t just look at Covid, you
have to look holistically at health and consider the collateral damage.”
Among the damage: a worsening incidence of cardiovascular disease and
cancer and an alarming decline in immunization. “People aren’t going to
the doctor,” he says. Dr. Bhattacharya also points to the suspension of
tuberculosis programs in India and of malaria-eradication programs
elsewhere.
Mr. Kulldorff’s second principle: “You can’t just look short-term.” Dr.
Bhattacharya says we will “be counting the health harms from these
lockdowns for a very long time.” He says anti-Covid efforts are sowing
the seeds of other epidemics: “Pertussis—whooping cough—will come back.
Polio will come back because of the cessation of vaccination campaigns.
All these diseases that we’ve made substantial progress in will start to
come back.”
Both men say that the Great Barrington Declaration is a call for a
return to traditional public-health practice. “We’re not arguing for
anything really novel,” Dr. Bhattacharya says. “It’s a call for thinking
holistically about public health again, not just about one disease.” The
declaration also reflects “the norms of open scientific discourse, which
have been violated by proponents of the Covid lockdowns in the name of
protecting the public from ‘dangerous’ ideas.”
Mr. Kulldorff laments the closing of scientific minds. He cites “a very
strange letter,” an open letter published on Sept. 9 by 98 faculty
members of the Stanford Medical School criticizing Scott Atlas (a former
member of the Stanford med-school faculty), who is on President Trump’s
coronavirus task force. “They criticized him very harshly for being
unscientific, for misrepresenting science,” but offered no evidence, Mr.
Kulldorff says. The Swede wrote a letter to the Stanford Daily, a
student newspaper, inviting Dr. Atlas’s critics to “a scientific
discussion or discourse, but none of the 98 were willing to engage in
that.” Mr. Kulldorff adds that, “from talking to Scott, who I’ve gotten
to know somewhat through the epidemic, I learned that not a single one
of them reached out to him prior to writing that letter, to verify that
he actually believed the things they attributed to him.”
We circle back to the idea of herd immunity, which Mr. Kulldorff calls
“the most misunderstood term of 2020.” He jokes that use of the term can
invite “accusations of mass murder,” and Dr. Bhattacharya laments its
frequent “mischaracterization.” The words, he says, are a “technical
term that comes out of standard models of epidemic spread.” It is the
“end state of any epidemic where some immunity actually happens after
infection. It’s a biological fact. It’s not something nefarious or
strange.” Many media outlets, he complains, have said that “we’re
advocating a herd-immunity strategy. That’s a propaganda term. After
all, the lockdown-until-a-vaccine strategy will also end with herd
immunity.”
“As an epidemiologist,” says Mr. Kulldorff, “it’s weird and stunning to
have this discussion about herd immunity—flockimmunitet in Swedish.” He
likens it to gravity: “You wouldn’t have physicists talking about
whether we believe in gravity or not. Or two airline pilots saying,
‘Should we use the gravity strategy to get the airplane down on the
ground?’ Whatever way they fly that plane—or not fly it—gravity will
ensure eventually that the plane is going to hit the ground.”
Dr. Bhattacharya does say that he would call the idea “population
immunity” if he could rephrase it. The word “herd,” he says, “has
connotations that it doesn’t deserve.” But he stresses that herd
immunity is a basic scientific principle, from which flows the one
important question epidemiologists and policy makers need to consider:
“How do we get to that end state with the least amount of devastation,
the least amount of human misery, the least amount of death?”
Mr. Varadarajan is a Journal contributor and a fellow at New York
University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
Correction
Scott Atlas is a former member of the Stanford medical school faculty.
An earlier version misstated this.
Wonder Land: Leading epidemiologists have come together to write "The
Great Barrington Declaration," which urges a “Focused Protection”
strategy in managing the coronavirus, and has already been signed by
thousands of scientists. Images: Getty Composite: Mark Kelly
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
_______________________________________________
Hangout mailing list
Hangout-at-nylxs.com
http://lists.mrbrklyn.com/mailman/listinfo/hangout
|
|
