Making Devils

find these narrative mechanisms and ruthlessly cut them down

A very short to-do list for 2024, but let’s start with some background.

The Great Barrington Declaration was reckless and evil and monstrous and please hold on for a moment while I foam at the mouth and consult a thesaurus for some more scary adjectives. They murdered everybody with their wild-eyed ignorance!

Even the town selectmen in the place where the declaration was born denounced the authors of the thing for associating a caring and decent community with dangerous ideas, angrily informing the authors that they were disagreeing with Dr. Saint Anthony Fauci, the top expert. “Your declaration’s complete dismissal of the experts and their advice has caused many of our residents considerable alarm,” the selectmen declared. “In addressing this concern, as well as the unwanted media attention your declaration has received, we, as a board of elected officials, wish to clearly repudiate your philosophy.”

The local newspaper harumphed in unison, thundering portentously that “the world will little note nor long remember the declaration and what it advocates.” The Berkshire Eagle has spoken, ye huddled masses!

If you’ve forgotten the absolute madness of the “mainstream” response to the Great Barrington Declaration, go search out some old headlines.

Then go re-read the Great Barrington Declaration. Click here to find it.

I’m serious. Do this for yourself: compare the thing to the reaction.

Sample reaction:

Sample paragraph from the Great Barrington Declaration, a shockingly ignorant list of dangerous fallacies unsupported by science:

Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals. 

The vulnerable should meet people outside!?!?!? NuRSiNg hOmE sTAfFFFF roTaTioN shOuLd bE mInImiZEd!!!!!!!!!?!?!??!?!??!?!?!? Retired people should have GROCERIES DELIVERED!?!?!?!? MY GOD YOU VICIOUS IGNORANT ANIMALS WHY DON’T YOU JUST SLAUGHTER US ALL WITH YOUR BARE HANDSSSSS?!:!>!>{:PINJF@$O”HUVFD#OJFD@O”IC@$IO

The measured language of the Great Barrington Declaration produced howling lunacy from every corner, starting with the premise — I hope you already noticed this — that Professors Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University were inappropriately challenging the experts. Take a moment to scroll through Jay Bhattacharya’s academic c.v. by clicking here, for crying out loud.

See also this laundry list of denunciatory statements from scientists, such as “Dr. Rupert Beale, Group Leader, Cell Biology of Infection Laboratory, Francis Crick Institute,” who said that this “protecting the vulnerable” thing was just a bunch of nonsense:

An effective response to the Covid pandemic requires multiple targeted interventions to reduce transmission, to develop better treatments and to protect vulnerable people.  This declaration prioritises just one aspect of a sensible strategy – protecting the vulnerable – and suggests we can safely build up ‘herd immunity’ in the rest of the population.  This is wishful thinking. It is not possible to fully identify vulnerable individuals, and it is not possible to fully isolate them. 

Now, big finish: “Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19.” That’s the heart — the “central aim,” right? — of the Great Barrington Declaration. Everyone is not equally at risk; public health measures should be layered to provide more protection to people who need more protection, and more freedom to people who have less risk. Crazy! Wild! Dangerous! It is not even possible to fully identify vulnerable individuals, you fools!

But who else made that argument in 2020? Thanks to a discussion I had today, here’s a screenshot of goals and public health principles from another apparently radical organization that hates science. It was distributed in March of 2020, well prior to the Great Barrington Declaration:

In this careful discussion of the need for layered and locally tailored responses, note the repeated focus on protecting “individuals at increased risk for severe illness,” and “populations most vulnerable to severe illness,” and the important goal in the bottom left corner of “minimizing disruptions to daily life to the extent possible.” This sounds quite a bit like the Great Barrington Declaration, doesn’t it? The same document goes into detail about who, specifically, is most threatened by Covid-19, tacitly acknowledging levels of risk that are not the same for everyone:

But who made these insane, reckless, anti-science claims about protecting the most vulnerable and minimizing the disruption to everyday life for everyone else?

Here, I cut off part of that first screenshot from this document, so let me do that again:

I hope you at least laughed out loud.

You can read the whole ten pages of the CDC’s March, 2020 “Implementation of Mitigation Strategies for Communities with Local COVID-19 Transmission” by clicking on this link (or this one, with a slightly later date, at the CDC website) or by opening this PDF file:

Implementation Of Strategies Cdc

174KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

So.

The CDC said in March of 2020 that communities should respond to Covid-19 by focusing on the protection of vulnerable populations.

Then the Great Barrington Declaration said in October of 2020 that communities should respond to Covid-19 by focusing on the protection of vulnerable populations.

Then the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were promptly and widely denounced as dangerous lunatics.

Compare them for yourself. Again, the CDC’s March, 2020 guidance is here; the Great Barrington Declaration is here. The details are also interesting, and note what the CDC thought of widespread school and church closures in March of 2020.

We’ve watched this, now; we’ve witnessed the production of folk devils by manufactured mass hysteria. We’ve seen highly experienced academic researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford turn into scary fringe weirdos overnight because they said things that were actually pretty mainstream and scientifically accepted until they suddenly somehow weren’t. This is going to happen again. We’re on notice regarding the emergence of regular cycles in which we burn some witches.

So my very short to-do list for 2024 is notice. Look for the narrative shifts, the this-was-mainstream-yesterday-but-is-verboten-today pivots, the Jay Bhattacharya is a fringe character who has no business challenging the experts maneuvers. Be watchful, be ready, and be loud when the moment arrives. It’s coming, and it will be repeated.