Commentary On Oct. 4, 2020, with Prof. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). Our purpose was to express our grave concerns over the inadequate protection of the vulnerable and the devastating harms of the lockdown pandemic policy adopted by much of the world; We proposed an alternative strategy of focused protection. The key scientific fact on which the GBD was based–a more than thousand-fold higher risk of death for the old compared to the young–meant that better protection of the old would minimize COVID deaths. At the same time, opening schools and lifting lockdowns would reduce the collateral harm to the rest of the population. The Declaration received enormous support, ultimately attracting signatures from over 50,000 scientists and medical professionals and over 800,000 members of the public. Our hope in writing was two-fold. First, we wanted to help the public understand that–contrary to the …