Great Barrington — A controversial declaration issued earlier this month at a Great Barrington-based think tank on the COVID-19 pandemic has caused an international stir, with commentators and epidemiologists condemning it and perhaps hundreds of fake signatures added to it.

The American Institute for Economic Research, a free-market think tank on Division Street, held a private forum Oct. 3 that included epidemiologists, economists and journalists. Prominently featured at the AIER forum was professor Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist in the Oxford University Department of Zoology.
The result was the Great Barrington Declaration, a document of more than 500 words that endorses a concept called “focused protection” — better known as “herd immunity,” the virus-fighting strategy that relies on a large portion of a community becoming immune to a disease, thereby making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely.

In the absence of a vaccine, the only way to achieve herd immunity is infection. Some epidemiologists have cautioned against that strategy. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who advises President Trump on the coronavirus, has said if that strategy went into effect, “The death toll would be enormous.”
Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at Yale University, responded on Twitter to the declaration, calling it “grotesque.” Gonsalves characterized herd immunity strategies as “culling the herd of the sick and disabled.”
Gonsalves threw cold water on the idea behind the Great Barrington Declaration:
Others have noted that herd immunity was tried this spring in Sweden and yielded a surge in deaths, while failing to achieve the desired effects.
The Great Barrington Declaration decries “lockdown policies,” which, it states, “are producing devastating effects on short- and long-term public health,” including “lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health.”
The document calls for an end to lockdown strategies while protecting the most vulnerable in the population. While the declaration does not explicitly mention the economic damage inflicted by the pandemic, the press release accompanying the declaration lists the economy first in its string of casualties: “With patience and careful explanation, the panel reveals the lockdown agenda as cruel pseudoscience that has had a devastating economic, medical, social, and cultural impact on everyone but especially the poor and struggling.” There was also discussion of the economic effects in the film AIER produced, which can be viewed below:
The declaration also produced a spate of critical news and opinion articles, many coming from overseas. William Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist, told the Guardian the declaration seemed to be attacking the idea of mass, ongoing lockdowns, a proposal that virtually no one was suggesting.
“After pointing out, correctly, the indirect damage caused by the pandemic, they respond that the answer is to increase the direct damage caused by it,” Hanage said.
Writing in Forbes, Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer, and John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine, proclaimed that, “Herd immunity works — if you don’t care how many people die.”

Investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed wrote in the Byline Times, an alternative investigative newspaper in the United Kingdom, that the “think-tank behind the Great Barrington Declaration is part-funded by right-wing American billionaire Charles Koch.” Koch Industries has funded efforts to cast doubt on anthropogenic climate change.

Ahmed did find a $68,100 donation from the Charles Koch Foundation to AIER. That gift is indeed listed on the Koch Foundation’s IRS 990 form for 2018 and obtained by The Edge. Click here to review it and here to see AIER’s own 990 form, which includes important financial information and the salaries and benefits of key AIER executives. The Koch gift, however, makes up a fraction of AIER’s total revenues of more than $2.2 million for that same period.
The climate change section of the AIER website does contain dozens of articles hostile to climate change and environmentalism, including headlines such as “What Greta Thunberg Forgets About Climate Change,” “The Real Reason Nobody Takes Environmental Activists Seriously” and “Brazilians Should Keep Slashing Their Rainforest.”
According to Ahmed, who says he has reviewed relevant Securities and Exchange Commission documents, AIER owns American Investment Services Inc., the holdings of which include a stake in several major energy companies. Indeed, American Investment Services Inc. acknowledges on its website that the company is a “wholly-owned subsidiary of” AIER, whose website does not appear to disclose the association.
Guardian columnist Sonia Sodha has called the Great Barrington Declaration “half-baked” and added that, “It is a sorry parable about what happens when bad science gets co-opted by shady ideological interests.”
Tuesday, Ahmed also reported that a Koch-Funded PR agency, Emergent Order, aided AIER, which sponsored the Great Barrington Declaration. AIER paid Emergent Order $510,000 for “marketing consulting services.”

The Edge reached out to Jeffrey Tucker, AIER’s editorial director, requesting a response to the Byline Times stories. Tucker declined to comment, except to say, “Sorry but the statement from the scientists speaks for itself.”
AIER has, however, published several articles responding to criticism of the declaration, including “The Great Barrington Declaration and Its Critics,” “Reddit’s Censorship of The Great Barrington Declaration” and “The Great Barrington Declaration Is Not Saying ‘Lock Up Grandma.’”
Ahmed also engaged in some journalistic mischief. He was curious about the widely reported claims that “thousands of scientists” and experts had signed the declaration. So Ahmed looked into how the procedure for signing the declaration actually worked.
Sky News discovered 18 self-declared homeopaths in the list of expert names and more than 100 therapists whose expertise included massage, hypnotherapy and Mongolian khoomii singing.
Ahmed entered some fake names and found that there was no procedure for vetting signers and that all one had to do in order to be listed as a scientist was check a box. Strange names began to appear on the declaration, such as “Dr. Johnny Bananas” and “Professor Cominic Dummings.” That prompted the following response on Twitter from AIER’s Tucker:
The signatures page of the Great Barrington Declaration website now says that demand has necessitated the removal of the live list of signers. The page will be updated, AIER states, “with a static list of verified and approved signatures as time allows” and “Signatures will be made public after approval.”
Gonsalves, the Yale epidemiologist, himself the survivor of a deadly infectious disease, took aim squarely at AIER without mentioning the organization by name: