“The Great Birdington Declaration”: The Origins of Kennedy’s Avian Flu Herd Immunity Plan Explained
The idea of letting a dangerous pathogen rip for herd immunity emerged out of right-wing efforts to reopen the economy at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Written by Walker Bragman Published: 3/24/25
This piece has been updated from its original email version. Last update 3/28/25.
In a recent interview, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. proposed a novel strategy for dealing with the H5N1 bird flu virus spreading through poultry and dairy farms across the country: let it rip for herd immunity.
Kennedy told a Fox News interviewer that farmers ought to consider “letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds that are immune to it.” It was not the first time Kennedy pushed the idea on the channel. He has also come out against the use of vaccines to tackle the bird flu problem, which the administration inherited, suggesting they could hasten the spread to people.
Last month, Trump’s agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins put forward a similar plan, telling an interviewer that “there are some farmers that are out there that are willing to really try this on a pilot as we build the safe perimeter around them to see if there is a way forward with immunity.”
Kennedy’s statements on bird flu and rejection of the use of vaccines have drawn harsh rebuke from public health and medical experts, who warn that every new infection gives the H5N1 virus an opportunity to adapt to humans. Currently, it does not spread efficiently to people. Some online have noted the similarities between the proposed strategy and the approach the first Trump White House took to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, mockingly dubbing it the “Great Birdington Declaration.”
In her Substack post using the nickname for the proposed strategy, Jenn Dowd, a professor of demography and population health at Oxford, warned that it simply would not work.
“As with many highly pathogenic human infections (such as cholera, polio, tuberculosis), ‘herd immunity’ to reduce mortality doesn’t work,” she wrote. “These devastating illnesses were finally brought under control not by mass infection but through public health measures to control transmission as well as vaccines. This is the playbook that can also work for bird flu, even if the details and specific tradeoffs are still being worked out.”
Indeed, the suggested plan from Kennedy and Rollins echoes the plan articulated in the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial open letter published by a libertarian think tank, American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), arguing against pandemic lockdowns in favor of reopening and allowing the virus to rip through the young, healthy population while squirreling away the vulnerable.
The declaration’s authors, health economist Jay Bhattacharya, today a Kennedy ally and Trump’s pick to lead the National Institutes of Health, biostatistician Martin Kulldorff, and epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, all hailed from prestigious universities—Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford, respectively—which gave it an air of legitimacy. But they never did any modeling to demonstrate how their idea of “focused protection” would work. A subsequent study from 2022 found that such shielding strategies were not feasible.
Mainstream public health organizations and officials like World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus panned the document. But the declaration found a home on the political right, particularly within the Trump White House, which was reportedly focused on the president’s reelection and anxious to reopen the economy. The public, however, remained overwhelming supportive of mitigation measures, including closures, and was increasingly skeptical of Trump’s leadership. The declaration was choreographed to change those perceptions.
The day after the official-sounding document was written and signed—at a conference AIER hosted, complete with specially invited media—the authors met with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. Following the meeting with the “distinguished infectious disease experts,” Azar tweeted, “We heard strong reinforcement of the Trump Administration’s strategy of aggressively protecting the vulnerable while opening schools and the workplace.”
Azar’s “we” was a reference to another party present at the meeting: Scott Atlas, a radiologist with no background in infectious diseases who Trump brought on to advise the White House Coronavirus Task Force in August 2020. A herd immunity advocate who was reportedly on Trump’s list of candidates to serve as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlas famously pushed for the CDC to scale back testing and downplayed the dangers COVID posed to children.
Atlas later revealed in his book, “A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America,” that he had been involved in the planning stages of the declaration, having arranged the meeting with Azar as a means of getting one of the authors—UK-based epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta of Oxford—to the U.S. despite travel restrictions. Atlas’ connection to the authors ran through the right-wing Hoover Institution at Stanford. Bhattacharya had previously been a research fellow at the think tank. The group’s website currently lists him as a senior fellow (courtesy).
The White House’s embrace of the mass infection herd immunity strategy alarmed key officials within the administration. White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx testified to Congress that she had repeatedly raised concerns at task force meetings about Atlas. She criticized the president for failing to do all he could to save lives. Three days after the declaration authors met with Azar and Atlas, Francis Collins, then the NIH director, emailed Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, about formulating a “devastating takedown” of the declaration’s premise. By that point, Trump was no longer attending the meetings of his coronavirus task force, which both scientists were part of.
The declaration was not the White House’s first attempt to use contrarian medical voices to justify its politically motivated reopening strategy, which public health leaders like Fauci refused to go along with. In late July 2020, the president amplified a video on Twitter from a fringe physician group called America’s Frontline Doctors, which was supporting his normalcy push and reelection. In the video, doctors in white lab coats gave a press conference outside the Supreme Court and advocated for the Trump-endorsed unproven COVID treatment hydroxychloroquine and against lockdowns and masking, against the recommendations of Fauci and the CDC.
The group, whose founder would later get convicted for her participation in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was reportedly the brainchild of the secretive, influential Christian Right group Council for National Policy. Trump campaign officials were reportedly made aware of its formation and mission ahead of time. The AFLDS press conference opened with an address from Jenny Beth Martin, head of Tea Party Patriots, a right-wing dark money outfit that promoted early anti-lockdown demonstrations across the country and started the “Save Our Country” initiative with the American Legislative Exchange Council and FreedomWorks to advise the White House on reopening.
Trump was criticized for sharing the AFLDS video, but the following month, he met in the Oval Office with Atlas and one of the physicians involved with the group, Joseph Ladapo, who is now Florida’s surgeon general and whose name had been floated for CDC director. Other attendees included future declaration co-authors Bhattacharya and Kulldorff.
The mass infection herd immunity strategy articulated in the declaration had actually been bubbling up on the political right long before the document was written.
From the outset of the pandemic, business-aligned right-wing groups had been pushing for a return to normalcy in the face of a contracting economy and diminishing GOP electoral prospects in a critical election year. Although it did not explicitly call for pursuing herd immunity through infection, the Hoover Institution published a commentary on March 16, 2020, by libertarian legal scholar Richard Epstein that argued that public health interventions needed to be targeted “where needed,” meaning “toward high-risk populations, including older people and other people with health conditions that render them more susceptible to disease.” A week earlier, Hoover had published a piece by Epstein warning against calls to pass progressive policies in the face of the pandemic.
The next month, the Heritage Foundation published a reopening plan that argued, “Healthy, low-risk workers should be allowed to return to their jobs immediately, and vulnerable populations (the elderly and people with underlying medical conditions) should remain at home.”
The month before Trump recruited Atlas as a White House adviser, HHS science adviser Paul Alexander, who would later go on to call for the hanging of public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci, was promoting infection as the answer to the crisis. In a July 4, 2020, email to his boss, HHS assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo, Alexander wrote, “There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD.”
“Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk….so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected…” he argued. In a separate email, he told the CDC director that schools ought to open to allow children to get infected.
Alexander’s messages came as business-aligned right-wing groups, faced with worker shortages, were pushing to reopen schools. Two days after his email to Caputo, Trump tweeted, “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN.”
The right-wing push for herd immunity was not merely U.S. phenomenon. Sunetra Gupta, for example, whose research into COVID was bankrolled by the right-wing billionaire Von Opel family in April 2020, was advocating the strategy abroad long before authoring the Great Barrington, criticizing the zero COVID approach of countries like Australia while touting Sweden, which had minimal restrictions during its first wave and as a result suffered significantly more cases and deaths than its Scandinavian neighbors. Gupta influenced UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s September 2020 decision not to impose an emergency lockdown, which experts have estimated led to 1.3 million preventable infections.
At the heart of the right-wing herd immunity push was dubious science. In his March 16 Hoover Institution commentary, for example, Epstein argued that “From this available data, it seems more probable than not that the total number of cases world-wide will peak out at well under 1 million, with the total number of deaths at under 50,000.”
“In the United States, the current 67 deaths should reach about 5000 (or ten percent of my estimated world total, which may also turn out to be low),” it continued.
On March 24, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Bhattacharya and Stanford researcher Eran Bendavid asking the question “Is the coronavirus as deadly as they say?” and effectively answering in the negative. The future Great Barrington Declaration co-author and his colleague suggested it was possible the virus might only kill between 20,000 and 40,000 Americans and surely did not warrant broad mitigation measures like lockdowns.
Weeks later, Bendavid and Bhattacharya were listed as authors on two studies purporting to show that the disease was far less deadly than experts were projecting. One of those, a preprint out of Stanford, was revealed to have serious flaws—from methodological and recruitment issues to undisclosed funding from the founder of JetBlue, a lockdown opponent. One of its authors, Andrew Bogan, had also left science years earlier and worked as a manager of global equity funds. Two scientists who worked on the study distanced themselves from it.
Nevertheless, within hours of its publication, the preprint had been picked up by the political right and shared widely.
To date, COVID has killed more than 1.2 million Americans and left millions more suffering long COVID. Children have been among the casualties. According to some estimates, a stronger government response early on in the pandemic aimed at curbing infection could have prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Although it does not yet efficiently spread to humans, bird flu is potentially serious. The case fatality rate is high. The virus has been under surveillance by the World Health Organization for years because of its pandemic potential. The current bird flu situation is tenuous and there is no end in sight. The virus continues to spread through livestock and poultry. In defiance of Kennedy, calls are mounting to develop new vaccines across the political spectrum—from Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Donald Trump’s former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, to Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.
Last month, Secretary Rollins announced $1 billion in funding to address the bird flu problem. At the same time, however, the administration fired workers working on the situation, including those in testing and inspection, leaving the Agriculture Department struggling to rehire them. Last week, facing rising egg prices, the administration announced $100 million in new funding for research into diagnostics and treatments.
Beyond Kennedy and Rollins, the administration may soon have more COVID herd immunity promoters in key public health positions. Bhattacharya is awaiting a full Senate vote to confirm him as NIH director along with his ally, surgeon Marty Makary, Trump’s FDA pick.
UPDATE 3/25/25: Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary were confirmed by the Senate.
