Defending the Great Barrington Declaration

This is the website for the Declaration (GBD). Authored by three eminent virologists and epidemiologists at Harvard, Oxford and Stanford universities, co-signed by 34 specialists.

The GBD signature page: at time of writing, there were 509,193 “concerned citizens”, 10,278 “medical & public health scientists” and 28,062 “medical practitioners”. 

This is the WHO article criticising the GBD. And my fact-check of it. With my intro-post here.

Meantime, British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the GBD central claim was “emphatically not true”.

And here is the rebuttal to Hancock from GBD co-author Dr Sunetra Gupta, professor of immunology and vaccine development at Oxford University.

ADDED: Jennifer Rubin on the mixed messaging in WHO. Remember when David Navarro said that WHO is not in favour of lockdown, then the next day the head of WHO came out in favour. There’s some info here, though it may strike some as rather febrile.

Meantime the geniuses at Apple and Google believe they know better than world-renowned virologist, and have decided that you oughtn’t to hear about these issues and the debate about the best way forward to the biggest health crisis of out times. Google efforts to stifle the GBD. While, if you ask Siri, via “Look up”, you get this:

Not a link to the GBD. Not a link, even to the Wikipedia entry on the GBD (which is itself sniffily anti the GBD), but a link to a nakedly partisan piece by one Taylor Cowen, opinion columnist at Bloomberg, telling us that it’s “dangerous”! 

That is really shocking and I’m offended. Excuse me, Siri geniuses, excuse me Bloomberg, but I don’t need you to tell me what to think. Especially on an issue of such urgent public interest and on which many of us have informed views. 

And what’s maddening about that “Look up” result is that there’s nowhere to go to complain. Even here in Hong Kong, if our government does something I’m not keen on, I can contact them and usually get an answer.

Of course this is not the most egregious use of tech power to push their own worldview. The latest and worst is the suppression of an article on Hunter Biden’s emails implicating his father in his Ukraine business dealings. That’s a real corker! And a huge own goal for FB and Twitter.