Elon Musk has once again called for an end to lockdown measures intended to slow the spread of COVID-19. The Tesla CEO has been one of the most high-profile critics of lockdown and has repeatedly downplayed the pandemic over the past several months.
His latest comments were made as part of a Twitter discussion started by right-wing journalist and eugenics advocate Toby Young, who was falsely claiming that the Great Barrington Declaration, a petition that says that anybody who is not vulnerable to the virus “should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal,” does not appear in Google’s search results. It does.
The Great Barrington Declaration also calls for nursing to only “use staff with acquired immunity” and for retired people to “have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home” and “meet family members outside rather than inside.”
Responding to a tweet from Tesla fan Pranay Pathole, who calls for countries around the world to “learn from Sweden’s” response to COVID-19, Musk wrote: “Yes. We also have to consider population life-months lost from lockdowns & other restrictions vs life-months lost from any given disease.”
Google “Great Barrington Declarationâ€. It doesn’t show up. It’s been shadow banned. Discussion of it has also been censored by Reddit. It’s not a conspiracy theory, not misinformation, not part of the “infodemicâ€. Big tech is just censoring dissent. https://t.co/lfvXZmPsqj
— Toby Young (@toadmeister) October 10, 2020
Yes. We also have to consider population life-months lost from lockdowns & other restrictions vs life-months lost from any given disease.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2020
Sweden has taken a softer approach to the pandemic than most countries, choosing not to impose a national lockdown, but to encourage personal responsibility instead.
It opted not to close businesses and schools, or to make the use of face masks mandatory. It did, however, place a ban on gatherings of 50 people, asked people to observe and respect physical distancing, and told vulnerable people to self-isolate.
In May, Sweden recorded the most deaths from COVID-19 per capita in Europe, but in August, Mike Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program, praised the country following a considerable drop in outbreak statistics reported over the summer.
Cases there are now on the rise again and Swedish health officials are considering new protocols to slow the spread of the virus.
“The right thing to do would be to not have done a lockdown for the whole country but to have, I think, anyone who’s at risk should be quarantined until the storm passes,” Musk said on Sway, the New York Times’ podcast, last month.
He added that he and his family do not plan to get vaccinated against COVID-19 if and when a vaccine becomes available, and refused to reveal whether he would pay a worker if they refused to go to work because of COVID-19 fears.
Musk has also referred to the panic during the early stages of the virus as “dumb” and predicted that there would be “close to zero new cases in US … by end of April.”
