On October 4, 2020, when COVID-19 was raging, American schools were mostly shuttered, and vaccines were believed to be years away—a team of top researchers at the world's most prestigious universities, including Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya, Harvard's Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford's Sunetra Gupta—published the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial open letter challenging the official U.S. response of lockdowns and government control of ever-larger parts of the economy and everyday life.
Recognizing that COVID overwhelmingly affected elderly Americans and others with specific, identifiable health conditions, they called for a policy of "focused protection," in which the vulnerable would be kept safe and the rest of us, especially children and young adults, would be able to get on with our lives.
