Diet of Worms?

 

The Great Barrington conspiracy

Niall McCrae

 Dr Niall McCrae is a mental health researcher and social commentator, who writes regularly for Bruges Group, Politicalite, Salisbury Review and Gateway Pundit websites. He is the author (with Robert Oulds) of ‘Moralitis: a Cultural Virus’.

 

Hardly the Diet of Worms, you might think. (The picture is of Martin Luther before the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, at the Diet of Worms in 1521AD)

But amidst the global crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Great Barrington Declaration has caused epic controversy.  This scientists’ petition, calling for a different strategy to manage the novel coronavirus, opposes the group-think that has led to a tightening ratchet on citizens’ liberties with consequent economic carnage.

 

Campaigners against lockdown are derided as cranks and conspiracy theorists, in contrast to ‘the science’ and compassion of the interventionists. But now the alliance of professional and political orthodoxy is presenting a conspiracy theory of its own: the resistance to Covid constraints is a right-wing putsch against a global consensus on climate science and social progress. 

 

Signed in a village in rural Massachusetts, the Great Barrington Declaration is a New England journey of medicine, sailing against a headwind of powerful opposition. It proposes shielding of the vulnerable, while allowing herd immunity to develop naturally among the majority who have low risk. The original signatories are no obscurantists: Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University.

 

However, Gabriel Scally, a member of the British government’s SAGE committee, dismissed them as ‘fringe experts’. Furthermore, he referred to a minor left-wing website, which smeared the declaration as a scheme of misanthropic motives. The launch was hosted by the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER). Founded in 1933, this think-tank is supported by Charles Koch, one of the brothers whose wealth has kept American academic conservatism alive in a hostile environment. It has been very critical of the anti-capitalist climate change movement. 

 

Scally of SAGE tweeted: -

 

‘Let’s be clear where the ‘herd immunity’ let-it-rip nonsense that is the Great Barrington ‘big idea’ comes from. It is a product of the US libertarian right. The AIER’s goal is ‘promoting the ideas of pure freedom and private governance’. Covid-19 is their big chance.’

 

This ‘big chance’, according to the conspiracy theory, will be used to cull the population, and to enrich and empower libertarian extremists. Sounds like a new world order, doesn’t it? This is surely a classic case of projection and lack of insight by the lockdown zealots. The more that we hear from Great Barrington critics, the more it seems that Covid-19 is a tool of the climate alarmists’ agenda.

 

Political leaders around the world, including Boris Johnson and Democrat presidential challenger Joe Biden, are parroting the slogan ‘Build Back Better’. It’s no secret that this comes from the World Economic Forum, the masters of the universe who fuel eco-revolutionary and Marxist activism to undermine the nation state. In the ‘Great Reset’, democratic systems will be overridden by global decree (the ordinary people are too stupid to know what’s good for them). Health Secretary Matt Hancock recently promoted the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, another WEF concept.

 

Absurdly, anyone mentioning the globalists’ design is mocked as a conspiracy theorist. Kevin O’Sullivan, a British TalkRadio station host, said ‘there is no Great Reset…it’s just so ridiculous’.  Yet Klaus Schwab, WEF leader, openly talks of exploiting chaos to create order, described as the ‘New Normal’. Much of what’s happening today was predicted by Event 201, the desktop exercise by the WEF in 2019. We are rapidly heading towards a technocracy run by an unelected elite, controlling access to banking, travel and employment, and reducing us to digital slaves.

 

The Great Barrington Declaration has been attacked for countering the medico-political hegemony on Covid-19. As signatures neared two hundred thousand (mostly concerned citizens but also fifteen thousand scientists), Google magically made it disappear. After an outcry it returned, but search results are dominated by scurrilous diatribes against the sponsor and signatories. Anyone relying on Wikipedia would learn from the likes of Scottish government advisor Devi Sridhar (a social anthropologist) that it is not worth any consideration. Reddit banned it from a discussion forum.

 

Such censorship is what the Nazis, Stalin and Mao did to suppress science and knowledge. Is herd immunity such a reckless goal? Matt Hancock thinks so. In the House of Commons this week he rejected a rethink on the Covid regime, arguing that the Great Barrington Declaration is based on false premises. So a chap with a politics degree knows more than esteemed epidemiologists.  Junior health minister Nadine Dorries, who previously practised as a nurse, tweeted ‘there is no such thing as herd immunity’.

 

In a measured response to Hancock’s scorn, Sunetra Gupta explained the complexity of herd immunity, which is more complex than portrayed by politicians and their scientific advisors. Kulldorff and Bhattacharya were more scathing, noting Hancock’s ignorance in using the example of malaria as evidence against herd immunity. This disease is not transmitted between human beings but by mosquito bite, and it is nothing like a virus. Oncologist Angus Dalgleish remarked: ‘it is shocking that the Health Secretary does not have a basic understanding of infectious disease epidemiology’. 

 

Yet mainstream scientists, politicians and media continue to disparage the Great Barrington Declaration, some resorting to puerile jibes about fake signatories, as if someone signing as ‘Doctor Doolittle’ negates the support of half a million including forty thousand medical practitioners and health scientists. Suppression of a rational scientific argument is justified by Big Tech and the medical authorities by the vague notion of harm. Why is this declaration regarded as so dangerous, and who is really endangered?