Great Barrington — The selectboard has finally settled on an official response to an organization that appropriated the town’s name for a controversial strategy for fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
Before going into executive session Monday to discuss the Roger Road litigation, the selectboard unanimously endorsed a letter drafted by member Leigh Davis repudiating the philosophy behind the Great Barrington Declaration and its advocacy for a so-called herd immunity strategy to fight the pandemic.
Davis had proposed a letter last month. While her fellow board members agreed with its message, they thought its tone was too harsh and asked Davis to revise it. Click here to read the revised version accepted by the board and here to read the original.
See video below of the Great Barrington Selectboard at its Nov. 2 meeting discussing Leigh Davis’ letters concerning the Great Barrington Declaration:
The Great Barrington-based American Institute for Economic Research held a private forum on the COVID-19 pandemic on 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 controversial 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.
AIER says the declaration was signed by more than 600,000 people, including dozens of medical professionals, in addition to the three who authored it. The declaration gained widespread national and international media coverage.
After a public uproar on social media and in letters to the editor of The Edge, the town subsequently issued a press release rejecting the association of Great Barrington’s name with the declaration, condemning the strategy and insisting it jeopardized the town’s own COVID-19 safety protocols. At the suggestion of town public relations consultant Ellen Lahr, town manager Mark Pruhenski hired Business Wire for $1,160 to circulate the release to a wider audience.
Davis’ original letter condemned “the despoiling of our town’s good name” and added that “the notoriety you have courted will deter regular and future visitors who support our economy.” She further bemoaned the “callousness of that decision” and its “reckless disregard for our citizens.” The revised letter was toned down considerably.
“Just for the record, I do feel a strong response is warranted, but out of the spirit of collaboration and wanting to get a letter out that’s forceful and communicates what our reaction to the Great Barrington Declaration is, I have rewritten it,” Davis said Monday.
Board member Kate Burke embraced the letter but wanted to know why Davis had not demanded that AIER remove the town’s name from the declaration. Davis said she didn’t think the town had the authority to do that.
“I think that horse has pretty much left the barn already,” added board member Bill Cooke.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the other board members, Pruhenski and board Chairman Steve Bannon wrote a separate letter to the editor of the New York Times expressing “dismay” at the town’s name being used in the title of the controversial document. Pruhenski said he received an automated response from the Times but has not heard back from the paper about whether editors intend to publish it.
The board then voted 3-2, with Ed Abrahams and Cooke dissenting, to hire Business Wire again to circulate Davis’ letter.
The board heard from a couple of audience members through Zoom. Daniel Seitz, a lawyer and nonprofit consultant who has lived full-time in Great Barrington for 15 years, cautioned the board against purporting to speak for the entire town.
“If the selectboard wishes to send a letter to AIER on behalf of all of the residents of Great Barrington, then the only thing that the letter can accurately say is: ‘Dear folks at AIER, There are some people in Great Barrington who are upset that the name of the town was used in the name of the declaration. Please consider changing the name.”
“Anything more than that and the selectboard is no longer speaking for the entire town,” Seitz added.
Seitz is also executive director of the Council on Naturopathic Medical Education and works with emerging health care fields. Seitz, the former president of the board of directors of the Berkshire Food Co-op, is also a member of the National Organics Standards Board.
Seitz also wrote a guest column for The Edge suggesting the lockdown cure for COVID-19 was worse than the disease itself. He said the lockdowns decried by the Great Barrington Declaration have caused human suffering in the form of increased economic distress, suicide, drug addiction, homelessness and domestic violence.
“As with any crisis, the poor and less well-to-do bear the brunt of the impact, so I would like to remind our friends and neighbors in a relatively affluent community, who might, like me, not be badly impacted by the coronavirus situation, that their experience is not shared by all, including some not-insignificant portion of people in Great Barrington and Berkshire County,” Seitz told the board.
Paul Gibbons, the retired longtime Monument Mountain Regional High School athletic director and current vice-chair of the town Parks and Recreation Commission, told the board the town should “get on with our own local business and not worry so much about scientific hypotheses.”
“I’m just kind of glad that this is not back in the Middle Ages because I think that you guys might be on board with burning Galileo for holding on to the opinion that the sun was the center of the universe instead of the Earth,” Gibbons quipped.
