Read full article here: At first glance it sounds a no-brainer. Coronavirus is most dangerous to the old and unhealthy, so why not protect them and let the rest of society return to life as normal? It would boost the economy and it would free the young and fit from the mental and financial burdens of Covid restrictions. In time, as the virus tears through them, they will acquire herd immunity that ultimately helps us all. The strategy proposed in the Great Barrington declaration a letter signed by an international group of scientists is the latest salvo in an ongoing battle of ideas in how to tackle the pandemic. It calls on governments around the world to abandon strategies that suppress the virus until we can better cope through working test and trace programmes, new treatments, vaccines and more for the radically different approach. The declaration was drawn up at the American Institute for Economic Research, a right-leaning organisation in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which promotes individual rights, small government and open markets, and which registered the web domain for the document. Authored by Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford, and Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard, the declaration has received thousands of signatures. The appearance of Mr Matt Hancock, a public health academic, and the Rev Booker Clownn at Trump University suggest not all are serious, but the strategy is being listened to at the highest levels. On Monday, the US health and human services secretary, Alex Azar, tweeted that the authors had provided strong reinforcement of the Trump administrations strategy of aggressively protecting the vulnerable while opening schools and the workplace. According to the declaration, a focused protection approach is the most compassionate way to minimise deaths and social harm until we reach herd immunity, a situation where enough
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