The Vanishing Commissar
According to Wikipedia:
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, during the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture, and executions during the Great Purge, but he fell from Stalin’s favor and was arrested, subsequently admitting in a confession to a range of anti-Soviet activity including “unfounded arrests” during the Purge. He was executed in 1940 along with others who were blamed for the Purge…
Among historians, he also has the nickname “The Vanishing Commissar” because after his execution, his likeness was retouched out of an official press photo; he is among the best-known examples of the Soviet press making someone who had fallen out of favor “disappear”.
Doctors are helping to ensure the history of the pandemic unfolds on a similar trajectory as this photo.
Dr. Bhattacharya and the other GBD authors were correct, and the experts were very wrong. The Semmelweis Effect.
With this in mind, we can turn to a more familiar topic, the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). Although the GBD was sponsored by a proud child labor advocate, its authors now say their motivation arose solely from benevolent concern for poor children and the working class. Despite experiencing the pandemic entirely from their laptops, they portray themselves as heroes by cherry-picking unpopular mitigation measures and saying in essence, “All we did was opposed these, and if people listened to us they could have been avoided.”
Many incurious and credulous defenders of the GBD believe this. They claim the GBD simply “called for” vulnerable people to be protected and schools to remain open, and they treat this as a significant accomplishment. That the authors of the GBD “called for” others to do things on podcasts, was taken as proof that they would have been able to do those things if they were in charge. In this imagined universe, they would have protected vulnerable people, they would have opened schools, and we barely would have noticed the virus.
Several of my prior articles discussed how this rebranding effort distorts what the GBD actually said and what actually happened in places where it had influence. The virus made itself known. Many people died and schools closed.
In one such article, I discussed Dr. Edward Livingston and his contribution to pandemic revisionism, an article titled The Semmelweis Effect and The Great Barrington Declaration, which was published on the monetized misinformation Substack Sensible Medicine. In it, Dr. Livingston claimed that the “GBD authors were correct, and the experts were very wrong.” He further compared its authors to persecuted giants of medicine, an absurdity discussed by Dr. David Gorski.
Can you show me where it says that ‘herd immunity would arrive in 3-6 months’?
In my response, I noted that Dr. Livingston censored the core promise of the GBD- the mass infection of unvaccinated people under age 60-70 would lead to herd immunity in 3-6 months. However, neglecting Hanlon’s razor, I failed to consider that Dr. Livingston didn’t deliberately censor the GBD, rather he hadn’t read it and didn’t know what it was really about. Indeed, during a discussion on social media, I informed Dr. Livingston of the GBD’s core promise, to which he replied:
Here is a link-Can you show me where it says that ‘herd immunity would arrive in 3-6 months’?
Yes, I could. I’ve read the GBD.
The GBD’s core promise of herd immunity via natural immunity in 3-6 months was in the FAQ section, and they promoted this optimistic time frame often on social media in 2020. This was its entire point. Literally everything about the GBD centered around this promise, and its authors objected to mitigation measures precisely because they suppressed the disease. They felt mitigations “postponed the inevitable” and delayed the imminent arrival of herd immunity.
Beyond informing Dr. Livingston of the GBD’s core promise, I told him about some of the many flawed arguments and fake statistics- “we’ve had more flu deaths among children this year than than COVID deaths“– its authors used to numb everyone but seniors to COVID’s risk. In addition to minimizing the virus, the GBD’s authors spoke constantly about herd immunity and natural immunity in 2020, though they have since excised these phrases from their vocabulary.
Since the GBD’s authors and defenders won’t remind you, here are their main beliefs from 2020, all of which culminated in their core promise that mass natural immunity would rapidly lead to herd immunity.
Immunity to COVID was durable and reinfections vanishingly rare:
Herd immunity was inevitable:
COVID posed a “very moderate” of death risk to young people and non-fatal outcomes could be brushed away:
COVID’s risk kicked in at 70:
Children don’t spread COVID:
The mass infection of unvaccinated people under 60-70 would protect vulnerable people and rapidly end the pandemic:
The more important issue isn’t the immunity argument
An honest broker who claimed the GBD was “correct” would acknowledge and proudly defend these points. In contrast, Dr. Livingston sought to erase them. Indeed, immediately after learning about the GBD’s promise of rapid herd immunity via natural immunity, he claimed its entire raison d’etre simply didn’t matter. He blithely declared, “The more important issue isn’t the immunity argument” and said:
Some of the posts pushing back on what I said about the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) seemed to not get past their use of the term ‘herd immunity’…
We can dispense with the concept of herd immunity. However, one still needs to consider natural immunity. My contention is that the concept the GBD authors were trying to convey with the term herd immunity can be replaced by natural immunity. This is important because simply discounting the GBD because of a term they used does not serve in the best interest of public health.
This is beyond absurd. The GBD wasn’t about semantics, and no one is “discounting the GBD because of a term they used”. We discount them because of the misinformation they spread and the damage they caused. We shouldn‘t “get past” their use of “herd immunity”. They were all about “herd immunity” in the first year of the pandemic. The GBD mentioned “herd immunity” 5 times and the FAQ devoted an entire section to it where it was mentioned 18 times. They wrote homages to it titled It’s Mad That ‘Herd Immunity’ Was Ever a Taboo Phrase, Herd Immunity is Still Key in the Fight Against COVID-19, Life Can Go Back to Normal if We Make it Our Common Goal to Achieve Herd Immunity and Delaying Herd Immunity is Costing Lives.
Moreover, the GBD’s authors constantly claimed herd immunity was just around the corner. In fact, by July 2020 all three of them declared that some part of the world had already reached herd immunity. In Dr. Livingston’s telling they were “correct” and their brilliance will echo through the ages.
However, nothing could alter Dr. Livingston’s belief about the GBD, not even reading it for the first time. Dr. Livingston felt that because the GBD “advocated for” impressive things and objected to lockdowns that ended long ago, nothing else about it matters. Of course, no one says lockdowns were perfect and harmless, and pointing out their flaws is not a defense of the GBD. The GBD opposed them precisely because of the “immunity argument” and no country, not even Sweden, avoided drastic mitigation measures when the virus surged.
But let’s be clear about what happened here. Dr. Livingston is a professor at UCLA and was a deputy editor for clinical reviews and education at JAMA. He wrote an entire article about how the GBD was “correct” and its authors were oppressed geniuses. Other highly credentialed doctors from top medical schools promoted his article on social media, calling it “tremendous“, “excellent“, and “beautifully written“.
However, not only did Dr. Livingston omit what the GBD actually proposed, he was both unaware of it and indifferent to it. He simply didn’t care what the GBD said, and so Sensible Medicine readers won’t learn any of it. No article there will ever candidly discuss the true purpose and real-world consequences of the GBD. It’s like it never happened at all. To obscure reality, Dr. Livingston conjured a sanitized fantasy of the GBD and argued that if one discards everything in it that was incorrect, what remains is reasonable. Worse yet, he demands that others join his deliberate amnesia.
I refuse. We must resist these attempts to make us forget what people said in 2020. My articles on the GBD present their videos and articles so readers can directly hear exactly what they said. Like all defenders of the GBD today, Dr. Livingston didn’t do that, and he never will.
While the GBD failed to deliver herd immunity via natural immunity, they’ve succeeded in erasing the reality of the We Want Them Infected movement. They’ve replaced it with a fiction where they were selfless champions of the poor and vulnerable, and everything would have been just fine and dandy if only the “experts” had heeded their wisdom. This is how history gets rewritten in real-time. The Soviet propagandists who erased Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov would be proud.