Taking a gamble with the pandemic | Column – Tampa Bay Times

The Great Barrington Declaration might instead be called the Great Barrington Manifesto. That tweak would give it a more shall we say? proletarian ring.

The manifesto, to stick with that term, is named after the town in Massachusetts where it was unveiled earlier this month by three scientists with distinguished academic appointments who advocate a Focused Protection strategy for controlling COVID-19. The idea is to focus still more on protecting the most vulnerable while letting others live normally even if the result is that the virus will spread among the less vulnerable until, in a sense, it begins to burn out.

Hardly mainstream. But wrong?

The crux is this: Dont wait for a vaccine waiting still longer will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.

The manifesto thus weighs in more on the side of the jobless, the hard up and the impoverished than on the side of the perennially comfortable. It recognizes that he who can wait for a vaccine is the retired executive toasting friends during Zoom cocktails, not the restaurateur looking for work after the business in which he invested years of his life went puff. She who cannot wait is the maid shown the door to the street by a struggling hotel chain, not the six-figure-income lawyer who finds doing conference calls from her home is a nice break from doing them from the office.

You will recall that the pandemic and the lockdowns following it have cost tens of millions of jobs in the United States alone, and you have to ask how far the federal treasury can be stretched to provide continuing relief.

The manifesto advocates a gamble, and as Floridians understand, it is a gamble that Gov. Ron DeSantis is already making as he lifts COVID-19 occupancy limits on restaurants and prohibits local governments from fining people who violate their face mask orders. Indeed, he has taken advice from the manifestos authors, which flies in the teeth of the COVID-19 orthodoxy holding that we must continue to hunker down, albeit differently from state to state until, someday, vaccine makers bring us deliverance.

The authors of the manifesto are Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya, all epidemiologists, their university affiliations being, respectively, Harvard, Oxford and Stanford. They remain dissidents among their peers, to be sure. National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins calls their strategy fringe and dangerous. The chief of the World Health Organization predicts unnecessary infections, suffering, and death.

The authors of the manifesto see it differently. I should say at this point that, hardly expert but also desiring a new way forward, so do I.

The manifesto slants not toward a libertarian line of protest but rather a communitarian. Who suffers most from lower vaccination rates resulting from lockdowns, from fewer cancer screenings, from depression? The manifesto answers: the working class and younger members of society.

As for the young, it goes on: Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice. And who are the young who have the fewest out-of-school education options? We all know.

The manifesto does not, cannot, shy from the term herd immunity, an epidemiological concept now all but deemed politically incorrect. Though complex in its mathematical expression, the concept essentially refers to the natural immunity that builds across a population as a virus passes through it. Herd immunity, though assisted by a vaccine, can be attained safely enough ahead of a vaccine that is the manifestos hotly contested proposition.

Heres the argument, then: The most compassionate approach that balances risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection while better protecting those who are at highest risk.

Better protecting those at highest risk, especially the frail elderly, will be a big test of the gamble now under way in Florida, never among the states to lock down soon and hard. To date, of the roughly 16,000 COVID-19 deaths in Florida, about four in 10 have occurred in nursing homes and long-term care facilities. There is nothing but misery in those numbers, even if the nursing-home figure roughly accords with the national average despite the special challenges in a state with a large retirement population.

Every approach to COVID-19 is a gamble weighing risk versus benefit, an effort to be the least bad option. In the weeks since the manifesto was issued, it has been signed by more than 400,000 people betting it is a gamble worth taking.

Richard Koenig, a retired pharmaceutical-company executive and former reporter at the St. Petersburg Times, the predecessor of the Tampa Bay Times, is the author of the Kindle Single No Place To Go, an account of efforts to provide toilets amid a cholera outbreak in Ghana.

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Taking a gamble with the pandemic | Column - Tampa Bay Times