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Dr. Michael Osterholm challenges the Great Barrington Declaration and the low herd immunity myth
By Kent R. Kroeger (October 25, 2020)
Yesterday’s news that the U.S. reported a record number of new COVID-19 cases on Thursday (83,000+) did not surprise anyone who has been listening to Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, since this coronavirus pandemic began.
When many politicians and news media celebrities in March and April were talking about the pandemic as a single surge as part of a one large wave, Dr. Osterholm and his CIDRAP colleagues were warning that there would be multiple waves with the biggest likely occurring in the Fall.
Score one for Dr. Osterholm and CIDRAP.
When President Trump and more than a few media-selected experts were anticipating the fast development of a SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) vaccine, perhaps by summer’s end, Dr. Osterholm was on Joe Rogan’s podcast saying it would take many months, well into next year, before a vaccine could even conceivably be available for wide distribution.
Right again.
When Dr. Osterholm went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday and said that the next few months with be the darkest of the pandemic and the country, I took it seriously, even as I am a skeptic about the utility of widespread or selective economic lockdowns and remain optimistic that falling case fatality rates are a sign that treatments are becoming more and more effective against this viral scourge.
Dr. Osterholm would probably classify my views as naive and potentially deadly.
So when Dr. Osterholm on his podcast last Thursday called out the public health and epidemiological professionals who signed the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) — -which, among other things, says that “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health” and that “simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold” — -I listened.
Herd immunity is when so many people in a community become immune to an infectious disease that it stops the…
