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The key issue with the Great Barrington Declaration and similar efforts was never about the policy per se, it was the absurd pretence that we could have enormous COVID-19 outbreaks without cost
This was clearly never true
This was clearly never true
We had more than sufficient evidence by mid-2020 (and earlier) that large COVID-19 outbreaks come with an associated cost. People desperately wanted this to be untrue, despite the very clear reality
And so we got all this obvious misinformation, like the idea that the whole pandemic was just down to false positive results, or that we were all already immune to COVID-19 anyway
If these efforts had consisted of honest, reasonable arguments about whether government restrictions were the best path forward based on the data at hand, we would've been having very different conversations for the last 6-12 months
Instead, over and over again, we've had to spend countless hours fighting over basic facts, because the denialists would rather pretend that there was no pandemic than face reality and the difficult trade-offs that entails
It is totally acceptable to say "the pandemic is bad but I think there will be greater harms from government action". I might disagree, it's complex, but that's a totally defensible position
Instead, most denialists have just said "the pandemic isn't bad"
Instead, most denialists have just said "the pandemic isn't bad"
