NIH employees publish ‘Bethesda Declaration’ in dissent of Trump administration policies

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In October 2020, two months before Covid-19 vaccines would become available in the US, Stanford health policy professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and two colleagues published an open letter calling for a contrarian approach to managing the risks of the pandemic: protecting the most vulnerable while allowing others largely to resume normal life, aiming to obtain herd immunity through infection with the virus.

They called it the Great Barrington Declaration , for the Massachusetts town where they signed it. Backlash to it was swift, with the director-general of the World Health Organization calling the idea of allowing a dangerous new virus to sweep through unprotected populations “ unethical .” Bhattacharya later