Great Barrington, 5 Years On

by Phillip W. Magness

October 4, 2020, was the date of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement by medical professionals that presented the first formal argument against the COVID-19 lockdowns to gain a widespread scientific following. As we look back on this event, many of the principles articulated in the GBD are recognized as having been vindicated. We now know lockdowns did little, if anything, to stop the spread of the virus. They represented a sharp deviation from the pre-COVID scientific literature on pandemic mitigation, yet they achieved widespread adoption around the world with almost no scientific debate as to their merits. Despite their lack of efficacy, these policies imposed enormous social and economic harms, many of which still plague us today.

Full credit for the GBD’s text and arguments belongs to its three principal signers: Drs. Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya. I was one of the organizers of the small conference that produced the Declaration through my role as an economist at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), where the signing took place. Although much has been written about the GBD in its aftermath, its history—how the event came about, its effect on the lockdown debate, and, above all, the risks and vilification those of us who participated in it incurred—has never been told in full. To mark its five-year anniversary, I offer these recollections.

Lockdowns Begin

The earliest stirrings of what became the GBD began at the outset of the COVID lockdowns in March 2020. None of us knew how these events would play out at the time. Like all Americans, lockdown skeptics saw the videos of China’s draconian measures, which would later be adopted in lesser form in Italy, then the rest of Europe. We watched Anthony Fauci tout slogans about “two weeks to stop the spread,” and saw 42 of the nation’s 50 states impose “stay at home” orders through emergency decrees. I was in western Massachusetts when they began. Along with the rest of New England and neighboring New York, those of us living in Great Barrington had some of the most stringent and long-lasting iterations of this policy.

I was a lockdown opponent from the moment they were announced. This placed me in rare company, even among the liberty-minded policy circles I ran in. Ed Stringham, the president of AIER at the time, shared this skepticism. So did Jeffrey Tucker, who ran our editorial operations. Outside of our organization, I found a few scattered allies who were willing to speak out against the restrictions as they were unfolding. Like AIER, Jon Miltimore and Sean Malone of FEE were running criticisms of lockdowns on their website. Matt and Terry Kibbe at Free the People recorded some interviews over Zoom, questioning Fauci’s agenda. David Theroux at the Independent Institute saw me speaking out against lockdowns online and called to convey that they were with us. Beyond this tiny network, most people—including many libertarians—decided to remain silent about this unprecedented exercise in government overreach. And more than a few set aside their principles to embrace lockdowns, because this “emergency” was somehow different.

It was really that first month of the pandemic in which our very loose network of dissenting scientists and scholars started to crystallize. I first noticed the work of Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford during that period, although I did not know him yet. Professor Bhattacharya was one of the main co-authors of the seroprevalence studies in California, which tested for prevalence of virus antibodies in the general public. Their findings, published in late April, suggested that official case numbers undercounted the infection rate from COVID, thereby exaggerating its deadliness. His colleague John Ioannidis published a short article suggesting that lockdowns were based on faulty statistical assumptions. Around the same time, I noticed the work Scott Atlas was publishing at the Hoover Institute, which questioned the effectiveness of lockdowns and resonated with my own take on the subject.

For a brief moment, some of the New England states toyed with enforcement checkpoints on the interstate highways. In Albany, they set up a National Guard station at the airport to collect contact tracing forms for exiting passengers, even if they were not remaining in New York. Like everyone else in America, I found myself trying to study and make sense of what was happening. As the orders took effect, we reduced our office operations to a skeleton crew consisting of those who lived on site or immediately nearby.

I do empirical research for a living, so I took an interest in the now-famous (or notorious) COVID-19 model from Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College London, which heavily influenced the UK and US decisions to adopt lockdowns. By April 2020, I noticed something odd about the Imperial College model: the numbers published by Ferguson’s team predicted catastrophe in most countries, with deaths projected to peak around July, unless they went into lockdown. Meanwhile, the government of Sweden defied the rest of the world and decided against lockdowns. In the social sciences, we call this a “natural experiment” because it allows side-by-side comparisons of countries that take different policy approaches to the same problem.

The Imperial College model famously predicted astronomical death tolls in the absence of lockdowns: over 500,000 in Great Britain, and 2.2 million in the United States by late summer 2020. When applied to Sweden, it predicted almost 90,000 deaths in the same period. And yet as of the end of April, Sweden had fewer than 3,000 fatalities—high, but nowhere near what the models said they should be at that time. I wrote a short article on this emerging discrepancy and suggested that it exposed a significant flaw in the Imperial College model’s predictive abilities. It went viral online. About a month later, Ferguson was called to testify in the UK Parliament, and was surprised with questioning about the Swedish data by Matt Ridley, causing the two of them to have a testy exchange. Ferguson denied ever making these predictions about Sweden (even though they remained downloadable on the Imperial College website), but the story was out there. And Sweden, the one Western country that bucked the lockdown trend, became a focus of attention for those of us who questioned the efficacy of these policies.

It didn’t take long for the lockdowners to push back against our tiny, emerging group of skeptics by releasing a stream of studies that purported to validate these policies. The highest-profile one was, of course, from Imperial College, and claimed to show that lockdowns had already saved some 3 million lives. A closer look revealed that this claim was utter nonsense—a product of an unsound empirical design. The Imperial team used their own faulty simulation model to project deaths in the absence of lockdowns, compared it to actual numbers, and claimed credit for “saving” the difference. I remember being shocked at the lack of empirical rigor in their study, and noticed that it appeared to have been rushed into print by a friendly pro-lockdown journal editor. I am not an epidemiologist and have never claimed otherwise, but I do work in statistical analysis, and many of the statistical techniques used for epidemiology modeling originated in economics and adjacent social sciences. With my then-colleagues at AIER, Pete Earle and Max Gulker, I started assembling a bibliography of pro-lockdown epidemiology papers to evaluate whether they adhered to proper stat techniques for causal inference when evaluating their claimed efficacy. The vast majority failed to do so.

Summer 2020

I can’t remember exactly when I first noticed Martin Kulldorff’s work, but it almost certainly followed the growing attention around Sweden’s counterexample. Jeffrey Tucker alerted me to a Swedish biostatistician at Harvard who had been posting on Twitter about his native country’s bucking of the lockdown trend. He had been making similar arguments to my own about the Imperial College model’s failure, and had written a few op-eds about the failures of lockdowns in general. Around this time, we also discovered an epidemiologist at Oxford named Sunetra Gupta, who had been challenging Ferguson’s policy prescriptions in the British press. Ferguson, by then dubbed “Professor Lockdown” by the media, had recently been caught violating his own recommended policies to visit his girlfriend in London.

It is important to stress that there was no central organizing hub for the anti-lockdown movement at this time. It grew spontaneously as we discovered each other on social media, and hosted each other on the occasional podcast or Zoom interview. We had few, if any, voices in government policy arenas until August 2020, when Atlas joined the White House COVID Task Force as a counterbalance to the pro-lockdown faction headed by Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx. Since March 2020, most of the medical journals had taken an adamant pro-lockdown position (even though the overwhelming scientific consensus held, as of 2019, that lockdowns did not work). The alarmist models of the spring didn’t just usher in unprecedented government overreach; their urgent nature steamrolled any opportunity for an evidence-based scientific debate over their efficacy.

Despite a partial reopening during the summer months, rumblings about a second pandemic wave in the fall raised the prospect that lockdowns would return. Fanatical activist movements such as “Zero COVID” already blamed a premature reopening for our failure to eradicate the disease in the spring, even though this objective was scientifically impossible. Furthermore, we’d seen months of Anthony Fauci’s political maneuvering from Washington, yielding contradictory analyses that nonetheless always placed him in charge of the official policy recommendations. With the prospect of another shutdown looming, our small group of skeptics decided to convene an informal gathering of lockdown critics in the region to discuss the path ahead.

We met at AIER on a Saturday in early September. Tucker reached out to Kulldorff, who lived only a short drive away. He also invited Jenin Younes and Stacey Rudin, two attorneys from nearby New York. Both were involved in the nascent legal movement to rein in abuses of emergency powers during the pandemic. Stringham, Earle, and I joined for the conversation. A few weeks earlier, we’d heard that Atlas had invited Kulldorff and Bhattacharya to brief President Trump on the case against further lockdowns. Later, we’d learn that this White House meeting threw Birx into a fit of rage and prompted her to boycott the discussion entirely. Such was the sad state of affairs on the COVID Task Force: the lockdowners had made up their minds, and had no interest in any dissent or pushback.

We had no formal agenda: after comparing notes and talking through our predictions for a pathway forward, we headed to a local winery, which had just opened its space for an outdoor live music performance. We went over there for lunch and ate at one of their outdoor picnic tables. As we listened to James Taylor covers under a pop-up canopy, the owner dropped by each table to greet us and express his thanks for our business, given the trying circumstances of that spring and summer.

We made no concrete plans during this discussion, although Kulldorff floated an idea based on lessons learned from the spring: Why not hold a small conference on the efficacy of lockdowns featuring scientific experts and record the proceedings for public release online? The premise was simple: we aimed to correct the lack of a public scientific debate about lockdowns in March 2020. Fauci, Birx, and Ferguson shaped the first wave’s policy response without any real contestation. Nobody questioned the models in official policy circles, even though we now knew from the Swedish case that they were terribly exaggerated. And no serious discussion had been given to the tradeoffs and substantial harms of shutting down the country. If COVID cases spiked again, there needed to be an opportunity for scientific dissenters to present their case against lockdowns and provide the counter-arguments that Fauci et al. avoided in the spring.

The Conference

None of us at the September gathering knew when, or even if, a conference on the COVID response would come together. Within a few weeks, however, the fall surge was underway. Even more concerning, the aforementioned “Zero COVID” movement was calling for an even stricter China-style lockdown out of a delusional belief that the virus could be eradicated during this second wave.

The GBD conference came together almost spontaneously amid the unfolding events. The UK and other European countries started floating a second lockdown in late September. Canada was also discussing another lockdown, and some governors in the United States started hinting that they would roll back the summer reopening as soon as cases surged beyond the acceptable threshold. Kulldorff decided that it was time to hold the conference, then reached out to Tucker to see if AIER could host it, since we had a suitable facility and space. The basic idea followed from our discussions a few weeks prior: we would convene a small group of medical experts for thematic panel discussions on the different aspects of lockdowns, the pandemic, and other policy questions. The medical scientists would set the agenda and lead the discussion, while those of us who worked in the social sciences would be on site to ask questions about the policy implementation. We asked a couple of journalists to conduct interviews with the experts. And we planned to film the event to post online for the public—especially since we could not hold a large live conference in public due to the pandemic concerns, and associated restrictions on gatherings.

We threw together panels rapidly, based chiefly on participants’ ability to get to the Berkshires on short notice. My colleague Brad DeVos ran our educational programs department, which usually put on several conferences every year at the AIER campus during non-pandemic times. Brad called his team together to see if we could pull off an event. In total, it involved a little more than a dozen or so people, which would have been easy to organize during normal times. But during COVID, that was a major lift for us. We knew from the start that this was going to be a bare-bones gathering with scant attendance and smaller staff than we were used to working with, but we all chipped in as best we could. Due to the urgency of the topic, we picked the next weekend, October 3–4. With only a couple days to prepare.

At the AIER, photo credit Dariusz Jemielniak

In total, the conference involved a little more than a dozen people, which would have been easy to organize during normal times. The major advantage of AIER is that we had private housing accommodations on our campus (about 15–20 hotel-style rooms between the main house and on-site cottages), along with a ballroom and conference space to host the discussions. Martin, who lived within driving distance, got a hold of Jay Bhattacharya, who was able to book a flight from the West Coast. We found a handful of journalists who could be there on short notice—David Zweig, who conducted the main interviews, Jeanne Lenzer, who came as a correspondent for the BMJ, and John Tamny of the RealClearMarkets media team.

The trickiest part by far was getting Sunetra Gupta to the United States, given the international travel restrictions and associated bureaucracy. Martin Kulldorff set up a meeting in Washington on the Monday after the conference. The three invited scientists planned to brief Atlas and the Secretary of Health and Human Services on the discussions over the weekend, and present the main arguments against lockdowns. I distinctly remember when we got the call indicating that the State Department had just approved Gupta’s travel to the US. It might have been Wednesday before the conference. A couple of us were at AIER, going over the conference agenda. I used my cell phone to pull up the flight schedules from London to an East Coast airport to see if it would even be possible for her to get here. We found a single flight from London-Heathrow to Boston that landed that Friday afternoon. “I’ll drive to Boston to get her at the airport,” one of my colleagues volunteered.

The three scientists arrived on Friday. Our group prepared a small dinner with the scientists, and went over the schedule for the next day. I gave an informal tour of the AIER property to the guests as they arrived. As promised, my colleague made the nearly three-hour drive to Boston to pick up Gupta and her husband, returning to Great Barrington shortly after dinner.

The interview panels started on Saturday morning in the main parlor of AIER’s mansion. We set up GoPro cameras on tripods to film it from multiple angles. The three scientists sat in the front of the room, along with a TV screen next to them that we used to bring in a few remote experts by Zoom for specific topics. The journalists sat directly opposite of the scientists, recorders at the ready. I was in the back of the room with my AIER colleagues and a few other guests, including Younes and Rudin. The economists and attorneys weighed in as planned with policy and social science-related questions, but otherwise, Kulldorff, Gupta, and Bhattacharya handled most of the speaking. The whole event ran on skeleton crew with a shoestring budget at a moment’s notice.

As mentioned, our original plan involved editing the recordings of each session into thematic clips covering each topic and posting them on YouTube to make the scientific discussion available to the public. We wished to present the cohesive anti-lockdown case we never had the opportunity to make in the spring. The idea for a “statement of principles”—what essentially became the GBD—was not on the original agenda for the conference. Everyone’s attention was focused on the video recordings of each session and the journalist interviews.

The “statement” came about somewhat spontaneously during the event. By the last panel on Saturday, the scientists had distilled a wide range of topics into some cohesive themes about the ineffectiveness of lockdowns as a response policy, about the social and other public health harms of lockdowns that had been neglected, and about alternative approaches to the pandemic, such as the “focused protection” proposal.

The disastrous experiences in nursing homes in the Northeast during the first wave of 2020 provided an impetus for the “focused protection” concept. New York, Massachusetts, and several other states in the region experienced a “pandemic within a pandemic,” afflicting elderly care facilities with vulnerable residents. The nursing home disaster came about almost entirely due to policy mistakes. For example, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued a now-notorious order that required nursing homes to admit returning patients who were still positive with COVID. He did so out of the belief that hospital capacity was about to be overrun, and nursing homes could therefore take in the overflow of convalescing COVID patients even though they were still contagious. Instead, this led to acute outbreaks within the elderly care facilities as the virus spread between readmitted patients and staff. And that, of course, led to an extremely high mortality rate among vulnerable nursing home residents.

The GBD’s “focused protection” proposal essentially argued that Cuomo and other public officials had gotten it backward. They directed their efforts at large-scale society-wide lockdowns, while failing to address the nursing home vulnerability and, in some cases, even making that vulnerability worse. All focused protection aimed to do was to redirect public health resources to known vulnerable settings such as nursing homes, while also removing the society-wide lockdowns, which had proven completely ineffective at “flattening the curve” in the spring.

The idea for a Declaration first came up at some point on Saturday when we broke for lunch. One of the scientists suggested making a list of bullet points that summarized themes from the recorded sessions. Martin, Sunetra, and Jay began drafting the GBD from their notes and recollections after the recorded panels and had a working text by Saturday afternoon. We wrapped up the main panels around lunchtime, and most of the reporters and staff departed. Those of us who lived nearby, myself included, stuck around and acted as impromptu proofreaders as Martin, Sunetra, and Jay composed a first draft in the parlor, the same room where we held the conference panels. I believe it was Martin who proposed the Great Barrington Declaration as the name for the document: it was simple, called attention to the conference panel videos, and signified the location of the event, but it was nothing more sophisticated than that.

At some point in the conversation, we realized we needed a place to post the newly named GBD on the web. Lou Eastman, our website engineer, pulled out his laptop and reserved the domain name on the spot. Little did we know or expect that he would have to pull an all-night coding session to set up a website with enough bandwidth for the public signatures, which we expected to total a few thousand. Once the scientists had a working draft, they each reached out to their contacts in the scientific community to gather a dozen or so lead co-signers. I remember the excitement when one of them got an email response from Michael Levitt, a Nobel Laureate and prominent lockdown skeptic, indicating he would be happy to sign it. I recognized Levitt’s name because a couple months earlier I had been invited to give comments via Zoom to a local county board in California on the economic impact of lockdowns, and Levitt was the medical expert they invited on the same panel. Several other recognizable names came in from that informal network of lockdown critics among the scientific community. The authors also decided that they would limit the primary signer list to medical scientists and public health experts, although they wanted to invite the general public to sign it as a petition. Eastman worked on setting up a form to do so. I remember everyone joking that if we were lucky, we’d get 10,000 signatures.

Following a final proofreading, the scientists transferred the text to a flash drive. I walked over to the AIER office and printed it out on the largest paper that our printers could accommodate. That paper became the signed copy that we scanned and posted online. We held the “official” signing on Sunday before everyone departed, almost as an afterthought. We used a room in the AIER mansion that has original century-old hardwood paneling and offered a nice backdrop, but it too was picked at the spur of the moment. Soon enough, Martin, Sunetra, and Jay left for the airport in Hartford.

The Backlash

The initial response to the GBD was almost entirely positive. We posted both the document and the videos on Monday, if I remember correctly. The write-ups from the journalists in attendance also started to appear in their respective venues, almost all of them focused on the content from the panels. The Declaration went viral—and faster than any of us imagined. We suspected it could resonate with our readers and lockdown skeptics in general, but it quickly became a national headline.

By the next evening, the three scientists had calls asking them to appear for a primetime interview on Fox News. The Wall Street Journal picked it up, and the GBD became a national news story. At first we saw a rush of excitement, as if people had been waiting for somebody to make the anti-lockdown arguments in a structured way. The public had a thirst for a credible scientific alternative to Fauci, and three highly accomplished scientists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford fit the bill.

It wasn’t long before the media narrative took a sharp negative turn, mostly driven by journalists who blurred the lines between objective reporting and personal advocacy for lockdowns. One of the first examples I remember came from Stephanie Lee, a reporter at BuzzFeed who had been hounding Bhattacharya and some of his Stanford colleagues for months over conspiratorial insinuations that the airline industry was funding them to promote a premature reopening. Lee sent an email to the press inbox at AIER that was forwarded to me for a response. The note contained a long list of blatantly hostile questions, almost none of which pertained to the contents of the GBD or anything discussed on the recorded panels. Instead, Lee peppered us with innuendo-laden requests for information about who funded the conference, how much the website cost to set up, and whether the participants wore facemasks and adhered to various COVID distancing protocols while traveling to Great Barrington. She also sent the email after 4 PM and demanded an answer by the end of that business day, less than an hour later.

I remember laughing at the absurdity of Lee’s inquiry. Lee’s questions all insinuated a heavily funded conspiracy involving months of high-level secretive coordination and lavish backing from nefarious undisclosed sources, instead of an impromptu conference thrown together on a few days’ notice and a hastily built website. I even remember joking to one of my colleagues at the time that next “she’d ask to see the grocery store receipts for the coffee and the cheese plate during the breaks between panels.” We genuinely thought the request laughable and so blatantly hostile, that we decided not even to bother responding to her.

The next media attack came a day or so later out of some tabloids in the UK. A conspiracy blogger named Nafeez Ahmed figured out that he could submit fake names to the petition part of the website, and started to flood it with things like “Mickey Mouse” as well as extremely vulgar slang and profanity. At the same time, Ahmed was soliciting others to do the same on his social media feed, then turning around and “reporting” the very same hoax signatures he had instigated as if they were a news story. Our web team immediately fixed vulnerability, and we conducted an audit to remove all of the hoax signatures within about 24 hours of discovery. But the damage was done. Ahmed manufactured his own signature hoax campaign, then reported on it as if it was “news,” all to discredit the petition without ever having to engage its scientific arguments.

When that avenue of attack dried up, our detractors switched to a new set of attacks about alleged “dark money” funding from the Koch Brothers, Big Tobacco, oil companies, and other corporate interests who somehow stood to benefit from the end of lockdowns (although they never really explained how this was supposed to work, except for vague allusions to “greed”). Every aspect of this attack was patently false, yet it spread like wildfire among lockdown supporters on the Internet—including scientists who should have known better than to spread salacious conspiracist trash. David Gorski, a professor of medicine at Wayne State University, charged in the press that the GBD was a “eugenics program” to cull the elderly from society. Gavin Yamey, a pro-lockdown medical professor at Duke, published a crazy screed insinuating that the GBD was funded by a tiny number of tobacco company stocks in an index fund managed by AIER’s investment subsidiary. It did not occur to him that his university’s endowment and namesake came from turn-of-the-century tobacco baron James Buchanan Duke, thereby making his own employment status a far more direct example of what he was alleging.

Another line of early attack claimed that the GBD was stoking fears and “arguing against a strawman” because the lockdowns of the spring were already behind us. They completely dismissed the notion that a second round of lockdowns was around the corner. A widely circulated article from WIRED Magazine made this claim. Its author wrote “when the Great Barrington Declaration authors declare their opposition to lockdowns, they are quite literally arguing with the past.” That was on October 7, 2020.

As I later discovered via FOIA requests, Anthony Fauci was a particular fan of this WIRED article and circulated it among his contacts. Interestingly enough, the same voices who accused the GBD of arguing against a “strawman” in early October almost all went silent on that point a few weeks later as the UK, Europe, Canada, and certain US states revived their lockdown policies amid the fall/winter wave of COVID.

Almost everyone involved in the GBD conference faced backlash and vilification from the lockdowner side of the debate. Atlas (who was the friendliest voice to the GBD on the White House COVID Task Force), Kulldorff, and Bhattacharya all experienced various types of censorship and deboosting of their Twitter accounts in the aftermath. Stanford’s faculty senate censured Atlas in a direct attack on his academic freedom. Kulldorff was later forced off of a CDC advisory panel for expressing dissenting views about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine pause, and then forced out of Harvard over his objections to the university’s vaccine mandate for persons who had positive antibody tests from natural immunity.

AIER experienced its own social media feeds being deboosted and downgraded on web search results. Fringe anti-GBD websites like Ahmed’s blog received inexplicable bumps in Google news search results for “Great Barrington Declaration,” ranking ahead of the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and other respectable outlets with more neutral coverage. I received violent threats related to the GBD and my anti-lockdown stance, and our office experienced a flood of hate-mail and vulgar voice messages. Great Barrington is a sleepy rural town in the mountains of western Massachusetts—the type of place where people don’t worry about crime or trespassers. The flood of threats and harassment truly upended that tranquility.

Unknown to us at the time, much of the scorn came from the highest levels of government. Several months after the GBD, a colleague and I decided to file a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Institutes of Health on a hunch, asking for any public records that discussed the conference or declaration. We finally received our answer on December 17, 2021, with the first batch of emails. I was driving from Massachusetts to Virginia on the New Jersey Turnpike when my colleague Ethan Yang called me to report that our long-lost FOIA request had finally arrived. He told me that I was going to want to see its contents right away, so I pulled over at a rest stop, tethered my laptop to a mobile hotspot, and read the PDFs. My jaw dropped when I saw the contents, which confirmed our worst suspicions.

On October 8, 2020, some four days after the GBD, NIH Director Francis Collins sent Fauci an email linking to our website and warning about the “fringe epidemiologists” who “even [had] a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt” to challenge lockdowns. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Collins directed. “I don’t see anything like that online yet—is it underway?”

Screenshot of email, shared by the author on Twitter

The accompanying emails showed that Fauci’s staff went to work as directed. They began curating lists of anti-GBD articles from the media, including the aforementioned WIRED piece. Subsequent banter between Collins and Fauci discussed how the former had worked his “fringe epidemiologists” narrative into an interview with the Washington Post. Another set of emails contained heavy redactions of private information, but strongly suggested that Collins, Fauci, and Birx were strategizing on ways to prevent Atlas from formally presenting the GBD at an upcoming COVID Task Force meeting. The lack of any scientific discussion undergirded the NIH’s response to the GBD. Fauci and his staff relied primarily on political op-eds to build their talking points, and they built their “take down” strategy by going on the attack in the media. The anti-GBD articles and links that Fauci’s staff circulated consisted almost entirely of opinion journalism. This really shattered any image of them as apolitical experts who “followed the science,” because they were not actually reading scientific papers or evaluating data and evidence that might challenge their existing assumptions about the pandemic response. They were collecting political talking points from the opinion page, then parroting them right back to reporters as if they were their own “expert” scientific assessments. The sheer lack of rigor in Fauci’s approach to public health policy really came through with that revelation. Atlas later told me that he had a similar experience with Fauci on the COVID Task Force—he would bring medical journal articles to the meetings showing the latest data and latest scientific findings, but Fauci would brush them aside without even looking and revert to talking points from political opinion pieces. I ended up revealing the story of the Collins/Fauci email to the world that evening from my laptop in the parking lot off of the New Jersey Turnpike. I took a screenshot of that email, posted it online with a tag indicating it was a new Collins/Fauci email drop from FOIA, and got back on the highway. When I arrived at my destination, the tweet had gone viral. The next day, it became a national news story. In the months that followed, it spawned investigations of Fauci and Collins. It became the basis of an anti-censorship lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court. And it ultimately helped to discredit these once-celebrated public health officials in the eyes of the public.

As I look back at these events after five years, I am left to wonder what other paths the world could have taken if only we had permitted scientific debate over lockdowns before settling on that course in March 2020. The Great Barrington Declaration emerged out of necessity that fall, precisely because of a need to evaluate lockdown policies that were obviously and clearly failing to deliver on their promises. It did not purport to have all of the answers to COVID-19, nor was it the elaborate conspiracy that our critics charged. It had the clear effect, though, of opening up scientific debate, and doing so against the wishes of a politicized “public health” bureaucracy. Those of us involved in the GBD were attacked and vilified for our sincere beliefs and scientific arguments. But as we evaluate the events of 2020, lockdowns have been discredited, Fauci’s standing before the public has undergone a reevaluation leaving his reputation in tatters, and the GBD’s substantive arguments have largely stood the test of time.

Phillip W. Magness is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and the David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy. He has served as Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, and as Academic Program Director at the Institute for Humane Studies and Adjunct Professor of Public Policy in the School of Public Policy and Government at George Mason University. He received his Ph.D. from George Mason University’s School of Public Policy. His new book is The 1619 Project Myth.