1/Y

Many criticized the article below co-authored by Jay Bhattacharya, who also co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration.

But I haven't seen a detailed explanation of why the article was wrong + dangerous. So I'll give one here

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/891040491214688257

https://theprint.in/opinion/majority-indians-have-natural-immunity-vaccinating-entire-population-can-cause-great-harm/582174/
2/Y

It was clear Bhattacharya + others were wrong long before the recent resurgence of COVID-19 in India.
So this is not just "hindsight is 20/20."

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1359626586283249665

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1321948456261455875

https://archive.is/wxqye#selection-47605.0-47668.0
[ https://judithcurry.com/2021/01/10/covid-19-why-did-a-second-wave-occur-even-in-regions-hit-hard-by-the-first-wave/#comment-942656]

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1339705542227464192
3/Y

Imagine the spread of SARS-CoV-2 as an accelerating car.

Some brakes help slow the car, such as masks, social distancing, contract tracing, etc.

But even without brakes, the car will eventually start slowing down on its own; that's herd immunity. https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1337238156052226050
4/Y

Once you have enough people immune to infection at herd immunity (whether immune by prior infection or vaccination), you can stop using the brakes and the car still won't accelerate.

Bad idea to release the brakes too early without herd immunity.

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1353149506943070208
5/Y

Bhattacharya doesn't like various brakes for ideological reasons (there's a reason he goes to right-wing outlets a lot).

So he exaggerated how close India was to herd immunity.

"a near majority of the population has developed immunity to the virus"
https://theprint.in/opinion/majority-indians-have-natural-immunity-vaccinating-entire-population-can-cause-great-harm/582174/
6/Y

That's consistent with Bhattacharya exaggerating the number of infections for over a year.
It's convenient for him in a number of ways, such as allowing him to give COVID-19 fatality rates so low they're impossible.

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1363988291335380992

https://archive.is/QLmJt#selection-2607.643-2607.882
7/Y

Bhattacharya accepts models when they're convenient for his ideology, + ditches them otherwise. He mixed that with his usual bad extrapolations from non-representative samples.

Anyway, India was nowhere near ~50% of their population being infected.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3810375
8/Y

So the car is facing the edge of the cliff.

Bhattacharya (falsely) tells the driver they are very close to not needing the brakes anymore to slow down the car.

What could be worse than that?

Well... Bhattacharya telling them brakes don't work. đŸ€Šâ€â™‚ïž

https://theprint.in/opinion/majority-indians-have-natural-immunity-vaccinating-entire-population-can-cause-great-harm/582174/
9/Y

I'm not going to rehash the reasons why limiting people being near each other limits transmission of a virus that spreads by people being near each other.

Not like Bhattacharya + his fans will learn at this point anyway.

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1364648060584919048 https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1371045429232631810
10/Y

One of Bhattacharya's proposed solutions is to reserve vaccinations for people who were not infected before.

That would be an interesting point,... except that he can't help but add to that his distortions of immunology and vaccines.

https://theprint.in/opinion/majority-indians-have-natural-immunity-vaccinating-entire-population-can-cause-great-harm/582174/
11/Y

There's good reason to think that vaccines will work better than "natural" infection with SARS-CoV-2.

There's also a chance they may improve the immune response of those previously infected.

There are other issues as well.

https://twitter.com/AlastairMcA30/status/1371649751284817923

https://twitter.com/VirusesImmunity/status/1284545152103657476
12/Y

For herd immunity, we want antibodies + B cells / plasma cells that prevent re-infection; i.e. we want neutralizing antibodies that cause sterilizing immunity.

(If any non-expert says, "but T cells!!" to you, ignore them
https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1341870231027920903)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1074761320301709
13/Y

Unfortunately:

- not all antibodies are neutralizing
- neutralizing antibodies can wane, allowing for re-infection
- SARS-CoV-2 mutations could evade antibodies, or result in a more contagious form needing more people immune for herd immunity

Etc. https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1384036645918310402
14/Y

Vaccines can help with this by increasing levels of neutralizing antibodies or addressing variants (see part 11/Y).

Conversely, allowing many infections facilitates the evolution of harmful mutants.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.10.21255251v1.full-text
https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/1358762039569694725

https://twitter.com/ashishkjha/status/1354995266143875072
15/Y

So who in their right mind would advocate for taking off brakes to allow for many infections?

Jay Bhattacharya, and his Great Barrington Declaration group.

At this point, he's just sabotaging the brakes for India and pushing the car off the cliff.

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1368251778114985991
16/Y

But if you're going to push the car off the cliff, you may want to downplay how dangerous that is.

So Bhattacharya reaches into his usual bag of tricks for doing that. For example, citing Ioannidis' work on fatality rates:

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1341187557326004225

https://theprint.in/opinion/majority-indians-have-natural-immunity-vaccinating-entire-population-can-cause-great-harm/582174/
17/Y

But Ioannidis' poor work leads to fatality rates so impossibly low that they require more people are infected than actually exist (Bhattacharya did the same in part 6/Y).

One of the places that happens is... India.

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1381473706489356291

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1369430446271037449
18/Y

And of course, Bhattacharya knowingly abuses the misleading "infection survival rate" framing.

Easy to cover up how bad 600,000 deaths are by saying '99.4% survival rate', without mentioning 100 million infected.

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1343610591156568067

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1341352277890789376
19/Y

As the car progresses on its descent towards the cliff, Bhattacharya downplays the risk to younger people onboard.

Ioannidis' debunked + impossible work makes room for that, as does willfully ignoring better studies

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1368266601267597312

https://theprint.in/opinion/majority-indians-have-natural-immunity-vaccinating-entire-population-can-cause-great-harm/582174/
20/Y

Bhattacharya also downplays the risk of sabotaging brakes, by side-stepping how India + other nations under-estimate their number of COVID-19 deaths.

https://bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n334

https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.08.21255101v1.full-text
https://github.com/akarlinsky/world_mortality/tree/main/local_mortality

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1294251323643265025

https://theprint.in/opinion/majority-indians-have-natural-immunity-vaccinating-entire-population-can-cause-great-harm/582174/
21/Y

The "brakes / cliff" analogy might offend some.

I no longer care. 🙂

I value the feelings of deniers like Bhattacharya less than the lives they put at risk.

https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1383374176514232327

Red circle is when Bhattacharya's India article was published:

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=false&Align+outbreaks=false&country=~IND
22/Y

On vaccinating infected people (see part 10/Y):

- vaccines help infected folks
- other priorities, like vaccinating the elderly + those in regular contact with the infected (ex: healthcare staff)
- risk of doses expiring waiting to find non-infected https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1384256272275439616
23/Y

And Bhattacharya's January 2021 article was in line with horrible advice he's given to India *for months.*

For example, before there was a vaccine he advocated for herd immunity via people getting infected.

https://twitter.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1283972385608171521

July 30, 2020:
https://techpolicyinstitute.org/2020/07/30/jay-bhattacharya-on-health-economics-and-coronavirus-two-think-minimum/
24/Y

Yet Bhattacharya + his Great Barrington Declaration team refuse to admit to they were wrong.

That's in contrast to those with integrity like Monica Gandhi, who apologized for what she said on India + herd immunity.

😡

https://twitter.com/gbdeclaration/status/1385675236750802946

https://twitter.com/MonicaGandhi9/status/1384902562688737280
You can follow @AtomsksSanakan.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled:
There are a lot of misconceptions about the Turkish diaspora in Germany. Since i just finished writing an essay about this topic I thought it's time to give other people
Read more
Las mejores calculadoras online en 2020A thread http://totumat.com/2020/11/26/las-mejores-calculadoras-online-en-2020/ Cuando se estudian asignaturas que requieren de cålculos complicados, nada mejor que contar con una buena calculadora.
Read more
Mitigating #ClimateChange is as much about taking up new techs as about leaving others behindMost studies focus on #coal's global downfall but another #energy tech decline is loomingRead my new
Read more