Dr. David Gorski over at Science-Based Medicine has a great post on the Barrington Declaration:

As for herd immunity, listen to this epidemiologist explain why, without a vaccine, trying to reach herd immunity is unlikely to be successful without massive death:

The main problem is something very basic — herd immunity requires IMMUNITY to the disease. When people are proposing herd immunity as an exit strategy for COVID-19, what they are implicitly arguing is that, once infected, you cannot get the disease again — you are immune.

Unfortunately, we know that this simply isn’t the case. There are already widespread reports of people getting reinfected with COVID-19, and worryingly some of these people are having MORE severe infections the second time around. This makes herd immunity in the traditional sense largely unreachable, because some people can clearly get infected and transmit the virus on to others over and over again.

We also don’t know how long the immunity will last even in people who get infected and are then immune. Some people may be immune for months, some for years, some for their entire lives — we simply have very little idea and won’t know for sure for a while yet. If large swathes of the population are infected this year but do not develop long-lasting immunity, chances are we’ll have epidemics in the future as well.

He also notes that this pretty much demolishes the Great Barrington Declaration’s suggestion to have nursing homes staffed only with people who’ve recovered from COVID-19. Why? Because it’s unknown how long their immunity will last, and that immunity might be very transient!

While COVID fatigue is a problem in the United States, Gorski shows that giving up on public health isn’t the answer, and is an act of genocide.