The Great Barrington Declaration and COVID Tribalism
The Great Barrington Declaration is an online petition that made its way around the internet over the past few weeks that made an impact on the COVID discourse.
The petition was written three public health scholars arguing that lockdown policies to reduce COVID spread are doing more harm than good through the impact on economic activity, social isolation, and worsening health outcomes across other diseases.
Their argument is that we cannot wait to relax lockdown measures until a vaccine has been developed and distributed and that instead, we need to focus on protecting the vulnerable - elderly, nursing home residents - while young people get back to their regular lives:
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.
With that last sentence, many folks in the public health world were triggered, and that led to a dueling petition.
The John Snow Memorandum argues that authors of the Great Barrington Declaration know nothing
The competing online petition known as the John Snow Memorandum argues that the goal of achieving herd immunity is mistaken and will lead to a lot of unnecessary death.
These authors - also public health professionals - argue that it’s probably impossible to restrict viral spread to only those who are less vulnerable and that, even if this can be successful, it will lead to a lot of really sick people who didn’t need to become ill.
Each petition makes more nuanced points than I’m summarizing, but overall, I think that I’m capturing the spirit of each petition.
The authors for each of these declarations are encouraging public health professionals, scientists, and physicians to support their calls for action and sign their petitions, thereby lending power to the ideas contained in these proposals.
This is a childish and counterproductive method of public health advocacy.
Dueling petitions leads to petty tribalism because of how it impacts group identity
Ezra Klein’s book, Why We’re Polarized, can help us understand why. Klein spends a lot of time talking about ideological sorting and our identity - it’s an incredible book that has influenced my thinking considerably.
He talks about research done by a social scientist named Henri Tajfel, who developed a concept called the minimal group paradigm, which is the smallest amount of commonality required for people to discriminate between groups.
The concept of an in-group (who we are) versus an out-group (the others) is an incredibly powerful influence on human behavior.
In one experiment, they took school age children and asked them to guess the number of dots on a page filled with dots.
They arbitrarily divided the kids into “over-estimators” and “under-estimators” and then looked at their behvaior towards kids in the different groups, asking the question, how do over-estimates treat other over-estimators differently than they treat under-estimators?
The findings from this research are scary.
Not only do we tend to treat people in our in-group much better than people in our out-group, we prioritize mistreatment of the out-group over beneficial treatment of our in-group.
This is why dueling petitions are counterproductive - because rather than focusing on ways to minimize overall suffering in this pandemic, we develop identity based on the petition that we signed.
Group identity is why politicizing a pandemic is such a harmful approach from our leadership
Making this discussion about Great Barrington versus John Snow isn’t that much different than making it about Republican versus Democrat.
The second you place people on teams, you lead to discriminatory behavior based on in-group versus out-group.
The tribalism that results from our President criticizing folks who wear masks and holding in person superspreading events while mocking testing and people who are being cautious has been so much more harmful than it needed to be.
When we understand that our identity dictated by our in-group will (subconsciously) influence the policies that we support and the way that we behave, it makes me think that politicizing a public health crisis is perhaps the worst abdication of leadership imaginable.
Enough with this digression on groups, what about the merits of their arguments?
I had enough people ask me what I think of the Great Barrington Declaration that I feel compelled to voice some ideas about the merits of these arguments.
While I won’t sign any petitions - or even criticize those who do, because I’m not about to make this between petition-signers and non-petition-signers - I do think that there are useful points that we can take from both overall perspectives.
Overall, I find the most persuasive argument to be about the harm that closing school is doing children.
We’ve learned from the school openings that we’ve had so far that kids certainly can transmit COVID and they can also get sick (and sometimes, really, really sick).
But, just like everything with COVID, impact falls predominantly on the vulnerable among us. School closures disproportionately impact poor and minority children. A lot of harm is being done to a group that is already starting from a disadvantaged place.
I think that the overall weight of the evidence seems to support liberalizing opening schools and understanding that while we can’t remove the risk - and also that we’re likely to have some kids who get really sick - opening schools is probably the right thing to do.
A more productive way forward would be to discuss the local conditions that would lead us to consider a policy change rather than a debate about which petition made better arguments.
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