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The declaration advocates that individuals at high risk of death from infection should continue staying at home, and that people at low risk resume their normal lives, by working away from home and attending mass gatherings.
[5][6] They hope that as a result most of these lower-risk people will contract the infection but not die, and that the resulting immune response will prevent the
SARS-CoV-2 virus from spreading to higher-risk people. The declaration makes no mention of
social distancing,
masks,
contact tracing, nor of
COVID-19 testing.
[4]
...
Harvard University professor of epidemiology William Hanage criticized the logic of the declaration's signatories: "After pointing out, correctly, the indirect damage caused by the pandemic, they respond that the answer is to increase the direct damage caused by it", and attacked the feasibility of the idea of "Focused Protection" for those vulnerable to severe infection, saying that "stating that you can keep the virus out of places by testing at a time when the White House has an apparently ongoing outbreak should illustrate how likely that is."
[5] He asked, "how would you keep the virus out if 10 percent of the younger population is infected at peak prevalence and with tests that cannot keep the virus out of the White House?"
[20] He called the declaration "quite dangerous, for multiple reasons", explaining that "if you do this, you’ll get more infections, more hospitalizations and more deaths" and that "the greatest risk of introduction to the most vulnerable communities will be when the rate of infection is really high in younger age groups."
[20] Hanage cautioned that uncontrolled infections among the young run the risk of long-term medical effects of the disease.
[5] He added that "we tend to make contacts with people around our own age, and given that none of the older generations would have immunity, they'd be in contact networks at risk of devastating outbreaks" and further explained that blanket lockdowns were not argued for by most experts in any case.
[20]
Gregg Gonsalves, assistant professor of epidemiology at
Yale University, described the strategy proposed by the declaration as "culling the herd of the sick and disabled", calling it "grotesque".
[40] Arguing nearly half the American population is considered to have underlying risk factors for the infection, he advocated for the prevailing quarantine strategy, since peaks in infection rates among the young were likely to correlate with deaths of more vulnerable older people.
[20] He wrote: "if you're going to turbo-charge community spread, as everyone else at 'low-risk' goes about their business, I want the plan for my 86-year-old mother to be more than theoretical."
[20]
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Further, it sounds like an astroturfing effort by the Koch Brothers
" It was sponsored by the
American Institute for Economic Research, a
libertarian think tank that is part of a
Koch-funded network of organizations associated with
climate change denial.
[7][8] "
en.wikipedia.org
gbdeclaration.org
