Scientists Are Slamming The Great Barrington Declaration’s Call For “Herd Immunity”

As the Trump administration signals a willingness to build “herd immunity” by purposely allowing the coronavirus to spread, major scientific organizations are denouncing a plan they say would be life-threatening and practically impossible.

That plan, laid out by three scientists in a controversial document called the "Great Barrington Declaration," calls for only protecting “vulnerable” people and letting everyone else get infected with COVID-19. The authors discussed the strategy in a meeting with two top White House officials last week.

This week, top US heath official Anthony Fauci, the head of the World Health Organization, and more than a dozen groups representing thousands of infectious disease and public health experts fiercely pushed back in a series of formal denouncements.

“We just gotta look that square in the eye and say it’s nonsense,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told ABC News Thursday.

“Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic. It is scientifically and ethically problematic,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday.

And on Wednesday, a group of 80 researchers called the idea “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence” in a letter published in the Lancet, a high-profile medical journal.