PREVIEW: The Great Barrington Declaration: Documents, Defenses, and Disputations
Another Shameless Attempt to Rewrite History
As America teeters on the edge of a devastating recession, I have done my best to stimulate the economy…by shopping for the most expensive toilet paper I could possibly find. Lepers and germs, the search will finally soon be over. Over at the webz0ne which shares a name with the rainforest we’re presently destroying, “MAHA Books” is selling an upcoming premium designer toiletry product which can be found quietly hiding away under:
“Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Internal Medicine > Pathology > Diseases > Viral”
It’s called “The Great Barrington Declaration: Documents, Defenses, and Disputations,” (GBD) edited by HHS senior staffer and ex-Harvard academic Martin Kulldorff & the shadow director for the Centers of Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) as well as the National Institutes of Health director, Jay “Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya. Preorders are being sold for $50.00, and the “Brownstone Institute,” an anti-vaccine propaganda outlet helmed by a lecherous cape-wearing neo-Confederate, is featured prominently on the cover. The creep who wants to take your teenage daughter out of high school to give her a Hooters uniform and a pack of Virginia Slims is currently pitching another useless online petition:
About the Authors
In the “About the Author” section on Amazon, it lists Jay Bhattacharya as a “physician, epidemiologist and health economist.” Jay never did a residency and never bothered to a attain a medical license - instead writing conservative policy after graduating. As a “health economist,” playing God with other people’s lives by torturing data in an Excel spreadsheet, his previous claim to fame was arguing that health insurance was subsidizing obesity. As NIH Director and now shadow CDC Director, Jay has done little more than censor scientists and record dozens of podcasts with wellness grifters, anti-vaccine quacks, and white nationalists.
Martin Kulldorff’s section fails to mention his time as a member of Harvard faculty, after he was terminated for insisting that the COVID-19 which hospitalized & nearly killed him somehow granted him lifelong immunity, rendering a vaccine unnecessary. It lists his time on RFK Jr.’s fraudulent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which was shut down by a federal judge after Kulldorff proved he couldn’t even run a simple meeting, whining that “we are rookies.” Prior to the GBD, Kulldorff wrote in Spring 2020 for The Spectator that those protecting themselves from COVID-19 (well before a vaccine as available) are “anti-herders” who should be considered just as vile and nefarious as any anti-vaxxer. Kulldorff now works directly for an anti-vaccine scam artist as the “Chief Science Officer for the Office of the Assistance Secretary for Planning and Evaluation” at the Department of Health and Human Services; an ironic title to be held by a completely unscientific crank.
What’s truly amazing is how these two federal employees have all this free time to write a whole book, after over a year of constant headlines showing nothing but constant failure and gross incompetence on their parts. Perhaps making childish posts to social media is not relevant experience needed to run critical federal agencies! Perhaps Congress should be looking into this!
If you don’t remember, the GBD was a useless online petition by a trio of laptop class academics exploiting their credentials to lend credibility to a conservative billionaire pitch that the mass infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans can magically end a pandemic. As countless Americans were killed and disabled by a new SARS virus in 2020, these three clinked champagne glasses thinking they had accomplished something meaningful. While children who suffered “mild” cases of this new disease developed MIS-C in their hearts and brains in 2020, these academics championed the virus as the best protection for children.
I will now explain how every sentence of this triple-D dogcrap excuse for a “book” is wrong - by going line-by-line through the Amazon description, as someone with an advertising background, focusing on just how the GBD lies to the public. Bolded emphasis is mine.
Paragraph 01: What’s a Lockdown?
Compare and contrast the actual science above to this blurb from the GBD book:
“Most of the world was in lockdown from March 2020 under the spurious theory that wrecking small businesses, closing schools, and compromising every civil liberty could somehow be a pathway to controlling a respiratory virus.”
COVID-19 is a vascular, multi-system disease caused by the airborne virus SARS-CoV-2, which is often inhaled via the lungs. Already, these laptop class academics are hard at work misleading you into believing that they know what they are talking about with multi-syllable scientific terms. As someone who has been organizing and compiling research on the impacts of COVID-19 for years, you would be a willful idiot to mispresent SARS-CoV-2 as a “mild” respiratory virus that goes in one lung and out the other, like the flu and common cold. Men generally do not develop erective dysfunction from the flu, for starters. Effective non-pharmaceutical interventions to prevent the transmission of airborne viruses have existed for decades prior to 2020, a fact that the GBD authors refuse to acknowledge.
Secondly, do you truly think that the Waltons of Wal-Mart, one of the funders of the GBD, gives a flying frak about small businesses? Do you know what dead people can’t do, on account of dying from COVID-19? Spend money at small businesses! Get real.
“Media censorship of alternative approaches began immediately, thus silencing credible critics.”
Credible?! Ha! This is a blatant, boldfaced lie, verified by a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court. As Walker Bragman has reported for Important Context, GBD writer Jay Bhattacharya has been humiliated by the courts time and time again. From FOX News to Substack to Youtube to the NIH & CDC, nobody would be misled into believing that Martin Kulldorf & Jay Bhattacharya’s speech has ever been censored. The Great Barrington Declaration was heard and soundly rejected, a fact they have never been able to accept as it contradicts their narcissistic delusions.
Paragraph 02: A Completely Fraudulent Rewriting of History
“Eight months in, and before the release of the pharmaceutical products pushed as the solution, a small group of scientists gathered to conduct an educational seminar on the basics of public health.”
This is an exceptionally offensive statement in just how false it is. The “pharmaceutical products” in question are the vaccines that have saved millions of lives, and became widely available just months after the GBD. No pandemic has ever been ended via the mass infection of the unvaccinated. These are basic, basic facts. Secondly, the conservative think-tank AEIR did not facilitate “an educational seminar,” but a deeply embarrassing display of incompetence. They seem to want us to forget that they filmed the proceedings:
The laptop-class academics giving this “educational seminar on the basics of public health” could certainly use some remedial classes on why it’s wildly inappropriate to demand the deaths of strangers.
“They concluded the meeting with what they called the Great Barrington Declaration. Through thoughtful digital strategies, its existence broke through the censorship apparatus and gained massive public attention.”
This is, again, a total lie. The GBD was prepared well in advance and not censored, it was soundly rejected by the overwhelming majority of scientists and doctors as wildly unethical, utterly useless, and willfully ignorant about the harms presented by SARS-CoV-2. Astroturfed by wealthy interests, the GBD gained traction with conspiracy theorists on social media, whose grip on reality is already rather poor. While doctors treated patients and scientists developed lifesaving vaccines, these academics insisted that spreading falsehoods on social media was the truly heroic act.
“It was ultimately signed by tens of thousands of doctors and scientists, and by nearly a million citizens around the world.”
This is another shameless rewriting of history. The list of signees for a useless online petition was retracted from public viewing because it was overwhelmingly fake names such as “Doctor Fart.” If the GBD was truly such a genius idea, then why do the authors have to constantly lie about it?
Paragraph 03: Delusional Narcissism
“That single document broke the illusion of consensus and cast a ray of hope for billions of people who were living under lockdown and mask mandates, and would soon face mandates to accept newly developed vaccine products.”
The GBD proposed mandating infection with a deadly and disabling virus for hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans as government policy, demonizing those who refused to go along with this unproven gamble as “anti-herders” and “Covidians.” No, seriously! Read for yourself:
Secondly, if 97 scientists hold one position, and 3 take an opposing view, that is still a scientific consensus. We do not drop everything, shun the 97, and focus all of our attention on entertaining the ramblings of three unqualified crackpots. Conservative billionaires do not get to decide what is scientific fact or not.
The “ray of hope for billions” was Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which led to lifesaving vaccines that would become widely available just months after the GBD’s publication. The GBD authors are engaging in a form of “Stolen Valor,” the worst crime one can commit in the eyes of conservative Americans. Call me controversial, but I don’t believe that our federal public health institutions should serve as an adult daycare for the wildly insecure as a result of unhealthy social media habits.
This narcissistic hallucination of the downtrodden and oppressed taking to the streets waving banners portraying Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta as noble heroes to the workers of the world is deeply, deeply pathetic. Engaging in a form of “code-switching,” Bhattacharya would go on left-wing media platforms with Max Blumenthal, Jimmy Dore, and others to lie about how he was the one who truly cared about working people. In reality, he wanted them to embrace death and disability with a smile on their face, as if we were back in the 1300s…
“The declaration came under heavy fire from government, media, and some public health scientists, though it actually represented little more than traditional public health wisdom.”
Really? Let’s check the tape, buckos.
The GBD was criticized by the overwhelming majority of public health scientists, because it got basic facts wrong, wildly underestimated COVID-19’s potential for serious harm and was “little more” than demanding the preventable, needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Secondly, the authors of the GBD were invited to meet the White House to meet with Trump, who was President in 2020; another fact they casually omit. Claiming that the mass infection of hundreds of millions of unvaccinated people with a new SARS virus is merely “traditional public health wisdom” is yet another obscene lie.
Paragraph 04: Safe Spaces and Fake Debates
“This collection brings together the important documents concerning the declaration, including additional explanations, discussions, and debates.”
Nah, uh…no it doesn’t. If the actual book is anything like this blurb, in which every sentence is a bold-faced lie, then it is an absurdist fantasy novel in which the authors hallucinate a power fantasy in which their useless online petition somehow saved the world. Secondly, as I’m sure my friends at Science Based Medicine would agree, the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration shied away from honest debate - especially with their professional colleagues in public health. Hiding in the safe spaces of conservative podcasts, FOX News, and one-sided opinion editorials, the authors of the GBD refused to engage with criticisms of their many, many errors. Instead, they tossed out childish insults like “Covidians,” and continued to make even more absurd demands such as “maintaining herd immunity through constant reinfection.” This is not how actual scientists conduct themselves:
“The experience told in these pages is, above all, a tribute to the power of ideas when the world needs to change course.”
Anyone can run their mouth for free. In fact, toddlers do it on a daily basis! This is not a meaningful or worthwhile “experience” worth writing about. The experience of the millions of Americans disabled by a virus the GBD authors insisted was harmless to them is censored. The thousands of parents who had to bury a child thanks to the virus these armchair academics sold as better than a vaccine are censored from appearing in these pages. The GBD’s support from lecherous white nationalist billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeffrey Tucker are also censored, just as David Zweig downplayed his association when speaking as a “Local Luminary” with his neighbors in the liberal enclave of Hudson-on-Hastings.
Literally every sentence of this upcoming book is guaranteed to be a lie in some form or another. It’s a mark of shame upon the authors and the universities which previously employed them as faculty. It should be met with nothing but ridicule and mockery as an embarrassing farce, as if COVID-19 itself employed a public relations firm.
Final Verdict
If I ran around Central Park jabbing a .357 magnum revolver into people’s faces and demanding the deaths of strangers at random, the NYPD would show up and slap the cuffs on me. If I did so with fancy academic credentials by my name and the backing of conservative billionaires, seemingly liberal-minded opinion editorial writers in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other outlets would fall over themselves to insist my demands were worth taking seriously. This latest attempt to rewrite history by Fartin’ Martin & Smilin’ Jay, who insist that their feelings overrule scientific fact, is both predictable and repulsive.
The original inspiration for the GBD, Toby “The Era of Vaccines is Over” Rogers from the United Kingdom, demanded hundreds of thousands of Brits embrace COVID-19 and the grave in April 2020 as a necessary sacrifice for “the economy.” Conservative billionaires and corporate media astroturfed these credentialed academics to lend credibility to these demands and sabotage public health efforts. Doctors in overwhelmed ICUs weren’t crying out begging for privileged academics in comfortable university offices to write an online petition to get even more patients on ventilators. Vaccine scientists weren’t hard at work in a lab blinded by dollar signs in their eyes, gleefully celebrating all the profit opportunities a new SARS virus provided.
While Amazon may not have any quality control standards, it’s blatantly obvious that “The Great Barrington Declaration: Documents, Defenses, and Disputations” does not belong in “Pathology,” “Internal Medicine,” or anywhere near “Medicine.” It is a nakedly unscientific piece of propaganda in which the authors, on behalf of conservative billionaires, demand widespread death and devastation in a failed bid for “herd immunity.” After the proposed “three to six months” of infecting hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans resulted in nothing but a mountain of dead and disabled, the authors would smugly shrug their shoulders and pat themselves on the back, declaring victory.
The GBD was nothing more than a demand that everyone be as useless and impotent as themselves. Thankfully, we’re no longer trapped in the 14th century. Perhaps these federally funded laptop class academics should get with the times instead of wasting our tax dollars to produce elaborate fanfiction.
