Great Barrington Declaration confirmation email sent and received more than a year after signing

8 December 2021

Commenting on “Who signed the Great Barrington Declaration?” reader

Jen Young

said:

I have a 12/20/21 email from ‘Great Barrington Declaration’ with a “belated thank you for signing”. I replied to a 10/6/20 email from a friend who asked me to sign telling her that I had signed the day before. So more than 14 months later my signing was confirmed.

…

I actually received four of the same email from them. The first email was 12/08/21, then 12/20/21, then 1/07/22, then 1/25/22.

Young forwarded me the emails. An image of the one she received on 8 December 2021 is below.

The text of the email, with links retained, follows:

Dear Friends,

From the depth of our hearts, a belated thank you for signing the Great Barrington Declaration. With over 850,000 signatures, together we opened up the pandemic debate. While many governments continued with their failed lockdown and other restrictive policies, things have moved in the right direction. For example, most schools have re-opened, most countries prioritized older people for vaccination and Florida rejected restrictions in favor of focused protection without the negative consequences that lockdowners predicted.

While occasionally censored, we have not been silenced. Since authoring the Declaration in October 2020, the three of us have actively advocated for focused protection through social media, op-eds and interviews on, for example, vaccine passports and natural immunity.

We have also launched Collateral Global, a charity staffed with academics from across the world to document and disseminate information about the collateral damage of the restrictive measures so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of this pandemic and are able to inform future policy with evidence and analysis. Collateral Global is crowdfunding so that this work can be done to the highest possible standards. You are welcome to join us and help us in those efforts at www.collateralglobal.org, as well as follow us on Twitter, etc. We are also planning an initiative on scientific freedom soon.

With enormous gratitude,

Jay Bhattacharya Sunetra Gupta Martin Kulldorff

Twitter: @gbdeclaration, @collateralglbl,

@DrJBhattacharya, @SunetraGupta, @MartinKulldorff

Facebook: GreatBarringtonDeclaration

LinkedIn: Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff

PS: We are just three scientists, not an organization, but we may send you a couple of updates per year. If you would like to unsubscribe, follow the link here.

Until last week, I thought I had signed the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020. Though I no longer agree with what it advocates and assumes, I felt my digital signature should remain “on it” as a reflection of what I thought at the time.

After learning that the Declaration had been reopened to new signatories for its five-year anniversary, turning it into a “living” document, I emailed Brownstone Institute’s Lou Eastman to request removal, echoing what Jonathan Engler did last year.

Eastman’s reply suggested I hadn’t actually signed, and raises questions about both how and where the submitted names are stored and why only a handful are displayed.

Who signed the Great Barrington Declaration?

I used the language in the email Jen Young forwarded to search my accounts again for any confirmation of having signed but the email she received (four times) did not turn up.

Social media posts show that I supported the GBD and its authors when it was first published, and continued to do so for the next two years or so. By early 2023, however, I was questioning its core tenets and some of the other statements now-NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya had made.

My and others’ pushback against his views is documented in the some of the articles on this page: