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OPINION | THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW

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Epidemiologists Stray From the Covid Herd

Great Barrington Declaration co-authors Martin Kuldorff and Jay Bhattcharya on the costs of
lockdown, the science of immunity, and the politicization of the coronavirus pandemic.

By Tunku Varadarajan
Oct. 23, 2020 2 22 pm ET

PRINT TEXT 11

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

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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
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against lockdowns and other economic restrictions that have hobbled
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I interview the two men jointly by Zoom—Dr. Bhattacharya in
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California, Mr. Kulldorff in Massachusetts. The former speaks of a
“systematic media campaign” against the declaration. He says Google 3. ‘A Dark Winter’: Biden,
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“shadow banned” the text in the days after it was published. “If you Visions for Nation at
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typed in ‘Great Barrington Declaration,’ what would happen is that the
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under a whole long list of negative stories.” (The matter has since Controlling
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I discover a similar 5. WSJ Opinion: Sanders

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immunity,” which the

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“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

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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

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“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 (also
on 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

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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.

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David Pearlman SUBSCRIBER
D 2 minutes ago
Rocky Mountain States
Emerge as New Covid-19
These men, and all the others who signed the Great Barrington Declaration Hotspot

are the real heroes here: Attempting to inject the learnings from centuries Why Merck Is Playing
of sound scienti ic practice into the hysterical COVID debate.  Catch-Up in the
Coronavirus Vaccine Chase

That the rest of the world is afraid of this declaration, crying heresy to In Tight Housing Market,
Sales Come With Surprising
anyone who might describe a better, more scienti ically-founded, approach, Conditions, Including
reminds me of nothing so much as the religious damnations of science Skeletons

during the dark ages.  Donald Trump, Joe Biden

Clash Over Covid, Ethics in
Calmer Presidential Debate
If you don't understand that protocol and practice has to re lect the entire
system, then you are part of the problem. 

And if your initial impulse is to equate what is stated in the GBD with one
political party, then you're probably not thinking clearly enough to even be a
relevant part of the discussion This isn't political this is a humanitarian
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28/10/2020 Epidemiologists Stray From the Covid Herd - WSJ
relevant part of the discussion. This isn t political--this is a humanitarian
discussion. 

Like  1 Reply  Share  Report 

Christine Parker SUBSCRIBER

C 44 seconds ago

Fantastic comment.

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Christine Parker SUBSCRIBER

C 5 minutes ago

If it weren't so depressing, it would be hilarious that the comments already

follow the argument in the article, i.e. that this has become so politicized
that people assume your political af iliations based on your position
regarding COVID. They lament the politicization because it keeps us from
having rational conversations about the real costs of lockdowns. They have
good points. 

If you want to rebut their points, fantastic. If you skimmed and assumed
these two scientists are shilling for Trump, then you are demonstrating
that they are right about the lack of critical thinking and the immediate
dismissal of a scienti ic argument based on perceived political af iliation. 

Address their arguments, or avoid posting. It would be so refreshing to

encounter a substantive discussion instead of an army of unthinking
partisans engaging in ad hominem attacks. 

Like  1 Reply  Share  Report 

suren rao SUBSCRIBER

S 6 minutes ago

The complete "lock down" methodology, was strongly advocated by the

western elite for one and only one purpose. Destroy the strong economy in
order to destroy the Trump presidency. 

Like  2 Reply  Share  Report 

Michael Baldridge SUBSCRIBER

M 6 minutes ago (Edited)

'Google “shadow banned” the text'  which is why I use DuckDuckgo.   Great
Barrington Declaration org is the irst listed item searching with it. 
Democracy dies in the Google dark.

Like  1 Reply  Share  Report 

Frank Hammond SUBSCRIBER

F 11 minutes ago (Edited)

Agree or not with their premise: the whole issue has been greatly
politicized as this is a presidential election year.  The seesaw arguments
being foisted on the populace are enough to make one's head spin.

For certain...for years to come, we will be inundated with numerous tomes

from various disciplines dissecting  our reactions to this epidemic.  No one
will be seen as a 'winner'.

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28/10/2020 Epidemiologists Stray From the Covid Herd - WSJ

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Lynn Gilbert SUBSCRIBER

L 12 minutes ago

It's good to see counter-viewpoints from established experts like these 2.  

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Ray Campbell SUBSCRIBER

R 19 minutes ago

Why would anyone believe a word from these so-called experts?  They are
just pushing their shallow ideologies on others. They can safely be ignored. 

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Lynn Gilbert SUBSCRIBER

L 14 minutes ago

If that's true, why not respond with scienti ic evidence to debunk their
theories?

Like  5 Reply  Share  Report 

Christine Parker SUBSCRIBER

C 10 minutes ago

Did you read the article? Because it predicted this response. 

Where did you get your medical education? Are you on the faculty of a
school like Harvard or Stanford? Are you a medical doctor or an
epidemiologist? Surely you have impressive credentials if you so quickly
overrule two highly-quali ied scientists.

So tell us about your background. Go ahead. I'll wait. 

Like  4 Reply  Share  Report 

Sarah Loew SUBSCRIBER

S 6 minutes ago

Ray Campbell is a Democrat.

Those are suf icient credentials to prove to others that he is always

right. We've been told that for 4 plus years now.

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Christine Parker SUBSCRIBER

C 2 minutes ago

Well dang, maybe I should become a Democrat too so I can always

be right!

(And before you jump on my presumed pro-Trump viewpoint, let

me say that I am a registered independent and that I do not
support Trump.)

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Ch i ti P k
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28/10/2020 Epidemiologists Stray From the Covid Herd - WSJ
Christine Parker SUBSCRIBER
C 2 minutes ago

Hey Ray - still waiting. 

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Steven Chen SUBSCRIBER

S 19 minutes ago

Asian nations have proved what work 

Western nations have proved what do not work (except NZ)

This author is trying to defend US conservatives by inding problematic

approaches from overseas 

When there are already examples of great successes from Asia, the US
should follow the advices of US scientists and the experiences of Asian
nations 

Don't not toy with human health and human lives (especially other people's
health and lives)

IF conservatives pundits volunteer to be anti-science and venture their own

health and lives by doing what they promote, please feel free to do so; I
would advice against such behaviors, but I can forbid people to do the
wrong things. 

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Tom Tierney SUBSCRIBER

4 minutes ago

"Asian nations have proved what work."

A subservient populace who enjoys government knees on their necks?

Yeah Steven, it works for Asian nations I guess.

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