Modelling a "Great Barrington" Pandemic Response
Seriously Engaging Silly Fantasies
As we've written about before, Stanford Medicine is sadly hosting a "pandemic post-mortem" conference on October 4th titled "Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Accessing the Past" which is little more than a playdate for anti-vax social media grifters. These unscientific charlatans are looking to borrow the credibility of the Stanford name to rewrite the history of the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic - which is still disabling and killing Americans to this day. This is a truly shameful moment for Stanford, and an insult to the medical students at Stanford University and the mountains of student loan debt they've taken on to start a career in medicine. We've previewed this event in its entirety here.
Since then, the conference organizers have added even more scientifically illiterate speakers including Alex Berenson, an unqualified Substack grifter who repeatedly proclaimed the pandemic to be over in the summer of 2020, and frequently lashes out with misogynistic abuse and unfounded accusations of pedophilia on social media. This, amongst other unprofessional antics, should not be platformed or entertained by any serious medical institution. These frauds will not be presenting quality research or any new science - but instead, simply repeating the same non-sensical, unscientific delusions about a pandemic that they so dearly wish to be seen as the heroes of, even when they did little more than rant online as millions of Americans have been killed or disabled by COVID-19 since early 2020 & continue to be harmed to this day.
What this conference is actually about is establishing a false "consensus" amongst "experts" that the "Great Barrington Declaration," (GBD) a fundamentally unserious and ahistorical approach to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. This fantasy insisted on the rapid infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated "low-risk" Americans, whilst failing to shield "the vulnerable" with a strategy of "focused protection," a back-of-the-napkin logistics strategy that isn't even a page long, (Science Based Medicine) and features such rigorous policy plans like "lock Grandma in a Motel-6" and "maybe the government could give out DoorDash giftcards?" This is to establish precedent for public health policy regarding future pandemics - policy that is doomed to fail, potentially killing and disabling millions more Americans.
The truth is that the anti-vax loudmouths of Stanford Medicine's upcoming "Pandemic Policy" conference cannot present serious numbers or projections of how a Great Barrington approach to COVID-19 would have "saved lives" in 2020 - these are clowns making a mockery of science for their social media audiences, masquerading as wise sages who have been "cancelled" by the "the establishment," speaking "common sense" to "Team Reality." They look in the crooked mirror of their own cinematic universe, in which they see themselves as intellectual titans, lording over the irrational weenies who have real-world responsibilities, such as actually treating COVID-19 patients. Too cowardly to defend their own ideals against the very real science of SARS-CoV-2’s harms and how to best prevent them, these armchair quarterbacks are frequently lashing out with insults or crying victim when challenged.
All to talk over & censor those doctors with frontline experience:
We at Pandemic Accountability Index are going to do the students of Stanford Medicine a favor, and we will tell you what the results of a COVID-19 pandemic response designed by the speakers of the "Pandemic Policy" conference would actually resemble. This "debate" has largely already been settled by real-world testimonials, hard science, and worst of all: basic math. For a gaggle of cranks who frequently cry that they're constantly being censored, none of the Great Barrington Declaration's loudest loyalists are brave enough to acknowledge when grim reality has proven their fantasies dead wrong, censoring the truth from their followers.
We're going back in time to March 2020, and we're going to rewrite history to show you just what a "Great Barrington" response to COVID-19 would entail - only to violently fail all the way from the White House, to the hospitals, and yes, the schools.
I. Spring 2020: The “Great” Declaration
Stepping through our portal, you notice that it's now March 2020 in our alt-history New York City. Hospitals are quickly being overwhelmed with patients suffering from a new disease that was just sweeping through China. Educators are dying on the job as kids presenting "mild" symptoms are bringing this new virus to school and infecting their teachers. Scenes of chaos and carnage are being broadcast across the country, as freezer trucks are leaving hospitals to deposit bodies in mass, unmarked graves. Some healthcare workers are so overwhelmed, they end up taking their own lives. It's worth nothing that multiple speakers at this "Pandemic Policy" conference have taken money from the Brownstone Institute, which insists this never happened.
Our alt-history President Donald Trump announces an emergency press conference to address the nation. Surgeon General Jay Bhattacharya and CDC Director Vinay Prasad boldly announce that this is a mild respiratory illness, "just a cold," that only affects "the vulnerable." White House Adviser John Ioannidis proclaims that only tens of thousands will die, no worse than any typical flu season - which is something he actually claimed in reality. (Youtube) The formal policy of the White House is that we will "protect the vulnerable," shifting tens of millions of Americans into "focused protection," while the rest of the population is expected to develop "herd immunity" from embracing the brand-new disease COVID-19, including tens of millions of children. "Don't Be An Anti-Herder," is the CDC's new slogan for March 2020, with a cartoon SARS-CoV-2 mascot spreading the good word of "natural immunity" to children. All in service of a new disease we knew rather little about.
The White House fails to establish formal guidelines on who qualifies as "the vulnerable." As the Great Barrington Declaration is a libertarian public health strategy designed by billionaires who detest federal regulatory authority, it's left to the individual states to design the best "focused protection" strategies for their individual "vulnerable" populations. Many state and local governments, who have been publicly scolded by the White House to reject public health "tyranny" and "lockdowns," wildly underestimate COVID-19 and who is considered "vulnerable" to this brand-new virus, of which there will be no vaccine available for the next year. In fact, the Trump Administration formally vetoes emergency funding for vaccine development, betting everything on a Great Barrington infection-based "herd immunity" strategy after CDC Director Prasad begins fearmongering about "myocarditis" and other side effects from what he would later declare in our reality to be a "useless" vaccine. No serious medical expert believes any vaccine is “useless.”
Obvious Points of Failure:
The entire history of pandemics has never seen a pandemic end via infection.
Expecting Americans to reject their own eyes & ears, witnessing the news broadcasts of the carnage in New York City, and blindly put their faith in Donald Trump, one of the most controversial Presidents in recent history? Fat chance.
"Focused Protection" is a radical new ideal that is entirely unproven, and even the Great Barrington Declaration's original authors have failed to detail how such a program would function. The hurried deployment of 50 states conjuring up fifty separate "focused protection" strategies to safeguard "the vulnerable" based off of incredibly loose, unscientific guidelines from the Trump Administration, creates a logistical mess which falls flat on its face. Actual public health experts would soundly reject this guidance, with state governors and local leaders forced to develop their own collective COVID-19 response without the assistance of the federal government, implementing mask mandates and other measures.
The expectation that tens of millions of American parents would force their children to nakedly embrace a brand-new virus in the Spring of 2020, that was rapidly killing Americans, is totally unrealistic. It took a whole new President, and a year-long propaganda campaign of minimizing, for the Biden Administration to get away with killing and disabling countless children with the SARS-CoV-2 virus starting in the fall of 2021.
The obscene fantasy that the Trump Administration had the power or authority to force hundreds of millions of Americans to embrace a brand-new virus which has rapidly been killing their fellow countrymen is totally absurd. One would have to consider the potential for open, violent revolt from proud, freedom-loving Americans who refused to embrace "Trump's virus.”
You shouldn’t have to re-write history to defend your proposed “Pandemic Policy.” Stanford Medicine is hosting speakers like Scott Atlas and John Ioannidis, who were on cable television being dead wrong in front of millions - yet insist they were right all along to this day, blaming others with outlandish conspiracy theories. This is completely unprofessional arrogance and has no place at any medical institution.
Looking at the very real history of how COVID-19 overwhelmed hospitals, let’s evaluate how a “Great Barrington” pandemic response would have grinded America’s healthcare system to a halt.
II. Capsizing the Hospitals
Waving a magic wand and ignoring the many points of failure we've just established, the United States, a nation of over 330 million people, marches forward into embracing SARS-CoV-2 with a smile, and are organized to bounce the virus back and forth like a pinball table. Remember: we have no vaccine, we are banning PPE in service of "herd immunity," and we are empowering employers to force the COVID-19 infectious into the workplace to spread the virus amongst one another. The scenes of carnage in New York City hospitals - that forced the necessity of stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, and remote schooling in the real world - inevitably begin to become commonplace in every major city in America. Americans who are not considered "the vulnerable," such as line cooks, begin to start filling up emergency rooms - and dying.
Oh, and remember that "Focused Protection" strategy that was supposed to defend countless millions of "vulnerable" (aka disposable) Americans? How you're supposed to be fine with locking Grandma in the Motel 6 and praying the (non-vulnerable) DoorDash delivery driver doesn't infect her? What about the hotel staff such as janitors - are they still required to embrace COVID-19 as part of this "herd immunity" strategy? Yet again, this is another serious point of failure that inevitably leads to outbreaks in "Focused Protection" centers, putting even more COVID-19 patients in the hospital, like we saw in nursing homes in New York and their terrible ventilation systems - again, we are soundly rejecting engineering solutions that mitigate airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in order to blindly gamble on the mass infection of hundreds of Americans in rapid fashion.
Nationwide in our alt-history 2020 America, we now have hospitals filling up with COVID-19 patients from both cohorts of "the vulnerable," and those "living normally." Many are dying. All of them are infectious, exhaling SARS-CoV-2 into the air - and as many of Stanford's "Pandemic Policy" experts are conspiracy theorists who insist that the entire global industry of PPE engineering is a scam, the use of PPE in hospitals is restricted in the hopes of further developing "herd immunity" by the mass infection of doctors, nurses, janitors, and other healthcare workers at their place of employment. This is a double-edged sword - not only are you further overloading hospitals with COVID-19 patients, but you are now further reducing the hospital's capacity to treat patients because too many doctors and nurses are sick. To loosely paraphrase one nurse from 2021: "No beds means...NO BEDS."
Many of these nurses and doctors will wind up disabled by their “herd immunity” bouts with COVID-19, further exacerbating America’s healthcare worker shortage - exponentially worse than one we’re presently facing in the “post-pandemic” fantasy. Mind you, absolutely zero of the “Pandemic Policy” speakers that Stanford Medicine is hosting ever acknowledge that a SARS-CoV virus could potentially disable the people they wanted to infect. Many of them openly deny Long COVID, or even outright harass those that are suffering - This is what Stanford Medicine now considers acceptable conduct.
You have now created an entirely new problem: As part of "living normally" in modern society, people suffer from various medical emergencies such as car accidents, heart attacks, shooting their own dicks off, and so on. In this alt-history “Great Barrington” pandemic response, you have now overwhelmed your hospitals with so many unvaccinated COVID-19 patients as part of your "herd immunity" via mass infection strategy, that there are no available doctors and nurses, much less beds, to provide "emergency" or even routine" medical care. As it turns out, doctors and nurses are not robots. You're also boldly demanding that healthcare workers risk dying on the job as you overload the capacity of their hospital to treat patients: a fundamentally obscene and inhumane request. One of many that these laptop class do-nothing "Pandemic Policy" experts love to make - here's another:
Imagine demanding people "live normally" and “get on with life” without a functioning healthcare system.
This doesn't even begin to identify the many complications involved in entertaining the delusions of our alt-history Surgeon General Jay Bhattacharya and CDC Director Vinay Prasad, that schools must remain open and uninterrupted to close out the 2019-2020 school year and resume normally in 2020-2021, without a single mask in sight. Stanford Medicine is playing host to childish, immature fantasies with no respect for how civilized society actually functions - and are way to glib about the opportunity to sign the death warrants of strangers without an ounce of remorse.
So now we attempt to rewrite history again, by pretending that schools could have remained open and functioned “normally” in the Spring of 2020.
III. School’s Sick for the Summer
It must be understood that for pestilence creeps like "Pandemic Policy" speakers Scott Atlas and John Ioannidis, tens of millions of American children were seen not as young lives who had the most to lose from COVID-19, but were instead vessels to saturate their families and communities with the SARS-CoV-2 virus: Get the mass dying out of the way quickly, and then "the economy" will be protected from the "normalcy" afforded by infection-acquired "herd immunity." Was there scientific literature documenting potential long-term harms from SARS-CoV infections? Yes, published in 2010. The bold revisionist history that Stanford University is entertaining is that tens of millions of American parents would willfully sign up to use their children as lab rats for a brand-new disease. This fantasy is completely obscene. We'll further entertain this nonsensical fantasy by comparing it to the reality of what has actually happened to countless American children.
With the wave of a magic wand, tens of millions of American parents reject the "fearmongering" media and the overwhelming consensus of medical and public health "experts," and willfully consent to the forced infection of their children with a brand-new virus by the Trump Administration in the Spring of 2020. As schools are not simply empty voids to dump children into, one has to wonder what public schoolteachers would do in this situation - with Donald Trump (and his alt-history lackeys CDC Director Prasad and Surgeon General Bhattacharya) demanding that they put their health on the line and submit to COVID-19.
In one branch of this alternate timeline, unionized teachers organize mass walkouts, effectively shutting down the schools. A ranting and raving Trump Administration goes wild, throwing out executive orders outlawing teachers' unions, mass privatizing schools, and deploying the uncredentialed, unqualified National Guard to replace the void left by now-fired teachers - not terribly far off from our own timeline. You are expected to pretend that a high-school dropout in combat uniform, who has more experience with an M16A2 assault rifle than an unruly child, is an adequate replacement for a credentialed and experienced educator - mind you, this is what actually happened in the real world.
For the sake of further entertaining this childish fantasy, we will yet again wave a magic wand, and force thousands upon thousands of unvaccinated public schoolteachers to submit to COVID-19 in the Spring of 2020. COVID-19 outbreaks inevitably occur in schools, and administrators scold parents into sending their sick children into school, further spreading the virus to construct “herd immunity.” Many are too sick to focus on learning, with kids puking up at their desks across the country. Teachers are being infected by sick children, with many becoming hospitalized or simply dropping dead, traumatizing many kids. Countless children start being hospitalized by COVID-19 nationwide, crashing pediatric ICU wards. It’s very obvious that zero actual education is happening in schools at this point.
Millions of American parents watch in horror as news broadcasts of sweet little Timmy gasping for breath before dying on a ventilator start becoming commonplace. Alt-history White House Press Secretary Alex Berenson convenes a press conference, ranting and raving as he jabs fingers and vulgar insults at reporters who dare question the White House's bold, forward-thinking "accept exposure" pandemic response. The clip goes viral as it becomes clear that the alt-history Trump administration's handle on the disaster has wildly spiraled out of control, and his roster of Great Barrington "experts" are left to squeal and howl as their fantasies failed to be realized. Sadly, we cannot "undo" the death of a child - hence the precautionary principle.
In our reality, hundreds of thousands of American children have lost a primary caregiver to COVID-19. Many because they were forced to bring the virus home from school and infect them by a government that pretends to care about "learning loss" while ignoring that bereavement is one of the greatest contributors to academic hardship. Now imagine attempting to mass infect tens of millions of children with COVID-19 in the Spring of 2020, when none of them have a single vaccinated adult to care for them. You would exponentially explode the bodycount, and rapidly expand a massive new population of COVID-19 orphans; a group of vulnerable children that the speakers of Stanford's "Pandemic Policy" lack a single drop of empathy for.
What’s sad is that the Biden Administration gave these quacks precisely what they wanted, and infected tens of millions of unvaccinated children with COVID-19 in the 2021-2022 school year. None of the speakers at Stanford’s “Pandemic Policy” conference have suggested any way to prevent this needless suffering forced upon our youngest - and instead chosen to double down on denial as children lose their careers, dreams, and futures to repeated SARS-CoV-2 infections.
None of these speakers have ever cared about how COVID-19 actually harms children and have shrugged off the thousands of dead American children whilst personally profiting from fearmongering about the vaccine, which has not killed any children. On top of that, a growing mountain of children have been disabled by COVID-19, something that these sadistic quacks have insisted is impossible, overblown, or simply not worth trying to prevent. The students of Stanford Medicine should be ashamed that precious time and resources are being wasted on the morally depraved, and formally protest this absurd parade of the chronically incorrect.
IV. A Winter of Herd-muliation
In the real world, COVID-19 infections began to lull in the summer of 2020, thanks in part to public health mandates such as requiring masks in public spaces. News of a vaccine on the horizon offered hope that this calamity may soon come to an end. Cranks like Alex Berenson instead insisted that this was proof that population had attained "herd immunity" via millions of COVID-19 infections.
In this alternate history fantasy that Stanford's "Pandemic Policy" speakers are peddling, alt-history White House Press Secretary Berenson would be smugly raving in August 2020 that the Great Barrington COVID-19 response was an overwhelming success atop a mountain of bodies, and the public health tyrants were soundly humiliated by Daddy Trump and his team of Evidence-Based Medicine All-Stars.
In reality, it became clear that many Americans were not making a full recovery from COVID-19, with some being left bedridden by what you are supposed to believe is "just a cold" to spread amongst your family, workplace, and community. Put in charge of Florida's COVID-19 response, Jay Bhattacharya falsely proclaimed "we protected the vulnerable" in the Fall of 2020. A new wave of COVID-19 infections rolled across the nation, overwhelming hospitals, and many Americans died, including the Floridians that Smilin' Jay falsely claimed to have protected; he has never admitted his many failures while working for Ron DeSantis.
As the 2020-21 winter wave of COVID-19 begins to sweep across our alternate history pandemic response, as designed by Stanford's "Pandemic Policy" speakers: with no vaccine on the horizon and having just endured a horrific several months of death and devastation, imagine the look on Americans' faces as they start being reinfected by COVID-19 after having just been told they already achieved "herd immunity." When they start being hospitalized by COVID-19 re-infections, disabled by COVID-19 reinfections, and yes, even dying of COVID-19 reinfections - which is the reality we presently face. The grim realization that countless American lives were thrown away in a failed strategy of mass infection, much worse than we have now, and the alt-history Trump Administration of 2020 has nothing to show for it but insults and abuse.
One could not be too extreme in predicting what might follow: societal breakdown and open revolt as COVID-19 settles into millions of American homes for the winter, leaving yet another devastating wave of death and disability in its wake.
We already know the consequences of mass infecting an unvaccinated population with COVID-19, thanks to Biden's refusal to fight pharmaceutical companies and ensure SARS-CoV-2 vaccine coverage in Africa in 2021. The results are absolutely devastating - mass disability, including chronic fatigue and cognitive impairment:
Nearly 50% of the people included in this meta-analysis exhibited long COVID symptoms…In this study, fatigue was the most common symptom (35.4%, 95%CI 25.6–45.2) which represents the most debilitating long COVID symptom…in Africa, it has the potential to lead to important impairment in productivity and further loss of economic agency.
…up to a quarter of patients included in this study experienced Mental Health issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or anxiety. This is concerning, because the additional burden in mental health disorder brought by the COVID-19 pandemic and its chronic consequences meets a health system which is largely unprepared to address mental health conditions.
The Economist estimates over 30 million COVID-19 deaths worldwide, largely unvaccinated. If America foolishly led the way in chasing a "herd immunity" strategy from mass infection in Spring 2020, there's no reason why that number wouldn't be exponentially higher. Public health policymaking has to live in the real world, not dominated by the fantasies of irresponsible social media grifters that want to gamble at the roulette table of infectious diseases - with your family’s lives.
V. In Closing
When Stanford Medicine puts on its "Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past" conference this Friday, it will be a damning indictment of the institution, and the further legitimizing of failed anti-vaccine ideals that are completely detached from scientific reality. There is no "debate" to be had with those who wish to engage in masturbatory fantasy, casting themselves as bold contrarian heroes whilst refusing to acknowledge the utter derangement of their failed ideals. As America risks a future dominated by pandemics such as H5N1 or Marburg, one can safely assume that these unprofessional contrarians will not be on the front lines fighting to save lives - they'll be sitting comfortably at home as you and your family's health is yet again gambled away.
We all have a duty to condemn this sort of unscientific nonsense and stop wasting time entertaining obscene distractions from the real-world problems facing public health in America - which certainly don't include whining about seeing a respirator in public. Stanford Medicine should cancel this event and condemn the speakers for their insult to medicine. If this doesn’t happen, then the students of Stanford Medicine should demand a refund on their tuition being wasted on empowering scientifically illiterate cranks.
As anti-vaccine grifters lobby to destroy what remains of public health in America by any means necessary, including rewriting history, those of us who have bothered to archive the actual history of what has happened throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, what was actually said, and how so many that Stanford Medicine is endorsing with the spotlight wildly ignored the reality of the many threats posted by SARS-CoV-2 lack wealthy billionaire backing. We need grassroots support from readers like you to keep this project going and fight for real accountability in pandemic mismanagement. If you could be so brave to support the Pandemic Accountability Index with a paid subscription or a one-time donation, the public’s health would be in your debt.
