No National COVID Policy: State by State Makes Better Sense

The Great Barrington Declaration is an eight-paragraph statement from many leading skeptics of the First World’s aggressive reaction to COVID-19. It was organized by the American Institute for Economic Research, a free-market think tank, and signed by lockdown skeptics including Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and plenty of others. Scott Atlas, the Stanford health-care expert who’s drawn fire for the role he’s playing in the White House’s approach to the pandemic, has endorsed it as well.

There’s good and bad in the declaration itself. More than anything, though, it makes me wonder if the kind of big-picture thinking it presents even matters, at least in the U.S. Truth be told, we’ve never had a coherent national strategy for fighting this thing, and we’re not going to start now.

About the Author

Robert VerBruggen

Robert VerBruggen is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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The Great Barrington Declaration is an eight-paragraph statement from many leading skeptics of the First World’s aggressive reaction to COVID-19. It was organized by the American Institute for Economic Research, a free-market think tank, and signed by lockdown skeptics including Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and plenty of others. Scott Atlas, the Stanford health-care expert who’s drawn fire for the role he’s playing in the White House’s approach to the pandemic, has endorsed it as well.

There’s good and bad in the declaration itself. More than anything, though, it makes me wonder if the kind of big-picture thinking it presents even matters, at least in the U.S. Truth be told, we’ve never had a coherent national strategy for fighting this thing, and we’re not going to start now.