Epidemiologists Stray From the Covid Herd -

Dr. Bhattacharya in California says" The politicization of Covid, is extremely unfortunate. People automatically assume what your political beliefs are based on your views on the pandemic. This is very strange, in my mind.” Dr. Bhattacharya adds that “the traditional markers for political identity have absolutely no meaning” in the context of Covid.

Mr. Kulldorff says "he has defended Sweden’s Social Democratic government, which “kept schools open against enormous international criticism,” criticized the British Conservative government for its lockdown, praised the Republican governor of South Dakota for her open-for business policies, and criticized the pro-lockdown Republican governor of Massachusetts, where he lives."

Dr. Bhattacharya cites "an example of Covid politics that he found “shocking.” When Black Lives Matter protests broke out in the spring, “1,300 epidemiologists signed a letter saying that the gatherings were consistent with good public health practice.” The “same epidemiologists” were arguing that “we should essentially quarantine in place.” In his view, this opened up the letter’s signers to “appropriate criticism, that they’d asked people to shut down their businesses, stay out of schools, stop worshiping, and yet they’re saying it’s OK to protest. It just reeked of political bias.”

The current lockdown policy, "asks children and young adults— “who face more medical and psychological risk from the lockdowns than they do from Covid infection”— to accept this harm “in the false hope that this sacrifice will protect the vulnerable people.”

Mr. Kulldorff describes lockdowns as “the worst assault on the working class in half a century— the worst assault since segregation and the Vietnam War.”

"Two cardinal principles of public health. First, “you can’t just look at Covid, you have to look holistically at health and consider the collateral damage.” Among the damage: a worsening incidence of cardiovascular disease and cancer and an alarming decline in immunization. “People aren’t going to the doctor,” he says. Dr. Bhattacharya also points to the suspension of tuberculosis programs in India and of malaria-eradication programs elsewhere

Second principle: “You can’t just look short-term.” Dr. Bhattacharya says we will “be counting the health harms from these lockdowns for a very long time.” He says anti-Covid efforts are sowing the seeds of other epidemics: “Pertussis—whooping cough— will come back. Polio will come back because of the cessation of vaccination campaigns. All these diseases that we’ve made substantial progress in will start to come back.”

“How do we get to that end state with the least amount of devastation, the least amount of human misery, the least amount of death?”