Focused Protection From the Great Barrington Declaration Never Made Sense
Why Focused Protection was never a real strategy for reducing the impact of Covid-19
During the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s likely that nothing has been more hotly-debated than government intervention against the disease. Were stay-in-place orders a reasonable response to a novel disease, or a calamity beyond imagining? Did closing schools cause a tremendous amount of harm, or was it a life-saving intervention that prevented a huge swathe of deaths?
Into this fray, in 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) came barreling through. The GBD was a statement signed by a group of leading scientists, most of whom were not involved in epidemiology or the Covid-19 response, that basically said that any measures taken against Covid-19 should be voluntary, and focused only on the highest-risk people.
Underlying this credo was a policy response that the authors called “Focused Protection”. Focused protection was an integral part of the GBD — the idea of the document was that, if we protected the elderly and vulnerable for 3–6 months, and let everyone else in…
