We now know that Dr. Bhattacharya and the other GBD authors were correct
Sensible Medicine is a monetized Substack that publishes anti-vaccine nonsense and pro-RFK Jr. propaganda. A recent article there by Dr. Edward Livingston reveals a typical technique misinformation doctors use to trick their readers and rewrite the history of the pandemic: censorship.
Dr. Livingston’s article was titled The Semmelweis Effect and The Great Barrington Declaration, and it said:
Despite the rich history of the dangers of rejecting new or alternate ideas about disease, the medical establishment has not learned its lesson. With COVID, the Semmelweis Effect was in full force. This time, it was the GBD authors who were the witches burned at the stake.
Jay Bhattacharya, who authored the declaration with Dr. Martin Kulldorff and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, is the face of the GBD and a modern day Semmelweis. Bhattacharya and his colleagues issued the Great Barrington Declaration on October 4, 2020, the pandemic was raging and the response to it was chaotic, calling for a reasoned approach to COVID…
We now know that Dr. Bhattacharya and the other GBD authors were correct, and the experts were very wrong. The Semmelweis Effect. Going forward, experts should be careful before discrediting new ideas. The more passionate the experts are about countering something, the more skeptical the public will be about the experts.
Though Dr. Livingston claimed “Dr. Bhattacharya and the other GBD authors were correct” he did not quote them at all.
We at SBM reject censorship. As such, our readers know that the GBD sought to spread a deadly infection with tragic consequences. Its authors were not “the witches burned at the stake,” as Dr. Livingston histrionically claimed. Rather they where sheltered laptop class doctors who drastically underestimated COVID, but were nonetheless rewarded with power and fame. In contrast, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis tried to save lives by limiting a deadly infection (though germ theory was not yet known). His advocacy for hand washing was rejected, and he tragically died in a mental hospital. Semmelweis and the GBD are mirror opposites in every way.
Today, Semmelweis functions as the medical version of the Galileo gambit. Dr. Livingston’s core argument was that because the medical established rejected Semmelweis in 1847, the GBD was “correct” about COVID in 2020. However, Dr. Livingston can only make this claim by censoring what the GBD actually said.
As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls.
Because I respect my readers and don’t hide information to deceive them, here’s the core premise of the GBD, taken from the GBD itself:
As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow 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. We call this Focused Protection…
People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.
The GBD further claimed that this mass infection of unvaccinated people would lead to herd immunity in under 6 months. They said:
For how long must high-risk individuals be careful and/or self-isolate?
When herd immunity is reached, they can live normally again with minimal risks. How long that takes depends on the strategy used. If age-wide lockdown measures are used to try and suppress the disease, it could take a year or two or three, making it very difficult for older people to protect themselves for that long. If focused protection is used, it will likely only take 3 to 6 months.
In articles, interviews, and on social media the authors of the GBD spoke constantly about natural immunity leading to herd immunity the first 1.5 years of the pandemic. This was what it was all about.
I didn’t censor anything
Yet, Dr. Livingston didn’t mention this at all. He deliberately hid what the GBD proposed because he doesn’t respect Sensible Medicine readers or trust them with the truth. His article was just one small example of pandemic revisionism in which misinformation doctors seek to erase the reality of the We Want Them Infected movement and replace it with a fantasy where pro-infection doctors only cared about poor children and the working class.
On social media, Dr. Livingston absurdly protested “I didn’t censor anything.” So here’s my challenge to him and anyone else who claims the GBD was correct- write a defense of the GBD that includes the passages in this article.
We all know that will never happen.