Great Barrington — It’s been said before that trying to get freedom-loving Americans to conform to standards of safe behavior during a pandemic is akin to herding cats.
It seems that every day we are treated to images of Americans, many in red states and wearing equally red MAGA hats, protesting limits on their freedoms and refusing to wear face coverings or maintain physical distancing.
Indeed, last week President Trump hosted a celebration in the White House Rose Garden promoting his new pick for the Supreme Court. With maskless VIPs hugging each other, the event turned into a super-spreader as several White House aides and Republican officials in attendance subsequently tested positive. And it looks like a campaign event in Bedminster, New Jersey, also put lives at risk.
The president himself was stricken by the disease, spent a few days in the hospital, returned and, speaking unsteadily from the White House balcony, gave a speech that evoked images of a South American dictator.
This all seems so foreign to us here in the Berkshires, where infection rates are low and the maskless are clearly in the minority. Turns out we’re not exactly united in our approach to battling the novel coronavirus.
Just when I thought I had the Berkshires figured out, along comes the American Institute for Economic Research, a free-market think tank on Division Street in Great Barrington. AIER is a nonprofit organization. Click here to see its most recently available 990 tax form filed with the Internal Revenue Service.
In the living room of the Stone House of AIER, which bills itself as “one of the oldest and most respected nonpartisan economic research and advocacy organizations in the country,” a private forum was held Oct. 3 that included epidemiologists, economists and journalists.
The result was the Great Barrington Declaration, a document of more than 500 words that endorses a concept called “focused protection.” As of Tuesday morning, it had been signed by more than 27,000 people, including 1,429 “medical and public health scientists,” 1,585 “medical practitioners,” and 24,061 members of the “general public.”
The declaration decries “lockdown policies,” which, it says, “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 data do support many of those conclusions. Even the Trump administration’s Centers For Diseases Control reports that stress and social isolation brought on by the pandemic can cause sleep deprivation, increased substance abuse and worsening of health problems both physical and mental.
Law enforcement agencies have also reported increased reports of domestic violence. Already high suicide rates have seen further rises. And while crime overall has declined, violent crimes such as homicides have increased in some cities.
Perhaps the greatest controversy in the Great Barrington Declaration lies in its insistence that the “goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.”
Herd immunity, as defined by the Mayo Clinic, “occurs when a large portion of a community (the herd) becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. As a result, the whole community becomes protected — not just those who are immune.”
Mayo says there are two paths to herd immunity for COVID-19: vaccines and infection. In order to achieve herd immunity, a certain threshold of immunity must be reached. For example, in the case of the highly infectious measles, for which vaccines are readily available, it is estimated that 94 percent of the population must be immune to interrupt the chain of transmission.
In the case of COVID-19, the coronavirus that causes it is a novel strain, so it is not yet known what the threshold of immunity is. In addition there is no vaccine and there won’t be an effective one for at least several months, or perhaps longer. Vaccines create immunity without disease or resulting complications. But without them, the only other way to achieve herd immunity is through infection.
“With a population of 328 million in the United States, it may require more than 2 million deaths to reach a 65 percent threshold of herd immunity, assuming the virus has a 1 percent fatality rate,” according to an analysis by the Washington Post.
The Great Barrington Declaration insists that “the most compassionate approach” is “focused protection,” or allowing “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.”
But the Post report throws cold water on that theory, noting that “proponents of herd immunity who talk of segregating and thereby protecting seniors, nursing home residents and others most likely to die of the virus, while allowing the virus to spread among the young. But growing evidence shows that young people — who work outside the home, or who surged into bars and restaurants when states relaxed shutdowns — are infecting their more vulnerable elders, especially family members.”
There is no question that the partial shutdown of the economy has inflicted economic misery on tens of millions of Americans and that it is more than fair to perform a cost-benefit analysis of the extraordinary measures that the federal, state and local governments have taken to contain the virus.
But common sense tells us that achieving herd immunity without an efficacious vaccine — even while isolating the most vulnerable among us, as the declaration proposes — will result in additional deaths. So invariably, the question we are confronted with is: How many deaths are acceptable in the drive to relieve economic suffering?
Since I’m not a health care professional, I don’t pretend to have the answer. I’m a humble journalist and a former teacher with nothing more than a master’s degree in literature. But it seems to me that both sides are obligated to address the question.
AIER also produced a short film encapsulating a two-hour meeting in the Stone House that included a question-and-answer session the morning before the document was drafted.
The primary interviewer was journalist David Zweig, a writer, lecturer and musician based in New York. It is not clear whether Zweig was paid for his efforts and, if so, by whom. AIER had not responded to requests for comment by publication time.
“He was granted full access and freedom to ask anything, and none of the questions were seen in advance,” AIER’s news release said. “What unfolds here is purely extemporaneous and spontaneous.”
Only one person during the Q&A session in the living room of the Stone House was always wearing a mask. Zweig wore one periodically. Audience members, including Zweig, appeared to be appropriately distanced from each other. The three-member live panel, however, was not.
See short film below depicting the recent “Private Summit of Epidemiologists Against Lockdowns” produced by the Great Barrington-based American Institute for Economic Research:
The Edge reached out to Community Health Programs in Great Barrington and Berkshire Health Systems, which includes Berkshire Medical Center and Fairview Hospital. Representatives from both organizations declined to comment.
Some local residents were alarmed that the town of Great Barrington’s name was on the declaration, though, to be fair, lots of documents and agreements have been named after the place in which they originated (e.g., Paris Accords; Oslo Accords; Camp David Declaration).
Alford resident Bill Shein, a writer, humorist and activist who ran for Congress in 2012 against incumbent Richard Neal, was less than pleased with the association, tweeting this morning: “Can’t say it’ll be good for the Berkshires to have this insanity on #COVID19 herd immunity associated with Great Barrington.”
Great Barrington Selectboard Chairman Steve Bannon, who coincidentally works as a pharmacist at Fairview, confirmed to The Edge that the declaration “has no connection with the Town of Great Barrington” other than geography.
Among other distinctions, Great Barrington claims to be the place of the first open resistance to British rule in America. It’s the birthplace and childhood home of renowned scholar and civil rights legend W.E.B. Du Bois. Smithsonian Magazine dubbed it the best small town in America in 2012.
Great Barrington has fewer than five cases of COVID-19 and an average daily incidence rate per 100,000 of zero. Now it’s the place where the Great Barrington Declaration was signed in the middle of the 2020 pandemic.
