Principles

However, a frequent claim of the GBD authors is that the mass infection of unvaccinated children and young people merely represented a return to the “basic ...

[Supreme Court](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts) ruled in favor of compulsory vaccination laws, and public health authorities would use measures opposed by the GBD to try to prevent polio. Cities in which multiple interventions were implemented at an early phase of the epidemic also showed a trend toward lower cumulative excess mortality, but the difference was smaller (≈20%) and less statistically significant than that for peak death rates. However, this was not a [universally accepted practice](https://twitter.com/ProfWehrman/status/1560976294980059137) even before the vaccine, and once a vaccine was available, only [anti-vaxxers](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/us/kentucky-governor-chickenpox.html) exposed their children to the virus. Cities in which multiple interventions were implemented at an early phase of the epidemic had peak death rates ≈50% lower than those that did not and had less-steep epidemic curves. However, the best comparison for COVID in modern times is clearly the 1918 flu pandemic, though a crucial difference was that the average age of death during that pandemic was 28 years. I’ve not seen the GBD authors use these particular examples as evidence supporting their position, nor could I find historical examples of public health officials exposing young people to a virus after a vaccine was available. However, it was still a virus and people used public health measures opposed by the GBD to try to contain it. [fantastical notion](https://twitter.com/Kit_Yates_Maths/status/1519013611661926400) that people could be easily divided into “vulnerable” and “invulnerable” categories and that the two groups could be completely walled off from each other for the duration of the pandemic. Sanitary efforts of the New York Board of Health in 1866, including inspections, immediate case reporting, complaint investigations, evacuations, and disinfection of possessions and living quarters, kept an outbreak of cholera to a small number of cases. A million deaths later, we are living in the world they envisioned, and if they are correct, we will have herd immunity by [February 2023](https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/is-anything-about-the-great-barrington-declaration-even-remotely-relevant/) at the latest. [we want them infected](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/16/trump-appointee-demanded-herd-immunity-strategy-446408)” philosophy, and aside from advocating vaccines for children, the CDC had largely adopted their policies. It was still risky, though much less risky than contracting smallpox naturally, and the discovery of the smallpox vaccine relegated this practice to the history books.