International scientific community speaks out against lockdown

6 October 2020

Business for Ending Lockdown (B4EL) supports the Great Barrington Declaration, released yesterday by world-renowned epidemiologists and public health scientists, calling for an end to all lockdowns.  

“The world’s foremost medical experts are coming together against lockdowns. The Great Barrington Declaration is their seminal statement. It makes a definitive recommendation: end all lockdowns. The Declaration carries immense weight, given the stature of its founding signatories, Dr. Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University), Dr. Sunetra Gupta (Oxford University), and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford University Medical School), and the leading scientists and practitioners, including Nobel Prize laureates, who have joined them,” remarks Piet le Roux, coordinator of the Business for Ending Lockdown Campaign and CEO of business group Sakeliga. 

B4EL calls on the South African government to adopt the Focused Protection strategy of the Declaration and to discard the current Lockdown strategy for dealing with Covid-19.  

B4EL also encourages medical practitioners, academics, and all interested parties to co-sign the Great Barrington Declaration. 

The Declaration calls for replacing Lockdowns with strategies of Focused Protection: “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection,” the Declaration reads. 

Focused Protection entails that “those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal,’ so that ‘society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.’ 

Le Roux continues: “Business for Ending Lockdown calls on the South African government to study and adopt the Focused Protection strategy, and to discard the Lockdown strategy. In South Africa, this would entail ending lockdown, lifting the State of Disaster, and converting all compulsory regulations into voluntary recommendations. We also encourage all medical practitioners, academics and interested parties to support the Great Barrington Declaration.” 

For more information about the Great Barrington Declaration, visit www.gbdeclaration.org. 

For more information about Business for Ending Lockdown, visit www.endlockdown.co.za. 

Issued by Piet le Roux on behalf of Business for Ending Lockdown, 6 October 2020