The Great Viral Debate
Drs Denis Rancourt and Tim Anderson exclusively on OffGuardian
Tomorrow (Sat Oct 10) we launch the first round of our Covid19 debate featuring Drs Tim Anderson and Denis Rancourt.
The global response to COVID-19 has been dominated by national and international responses involving unprecedented attempts to suppress and eliminate the virus. The responses have been controversial, however, and some scientists have questioned their wisdom and advocated herd/community immunity responses. In October 2020, a collection of scientists advanced the Great Barrington Declaration calling for an end to existing strategies based on suppression and/or elimination.
From a political perspective, a notable feature of debate in the Western sphere has been a tendency to, rightly or wrongly, associate the suppression/elimination strategy with liberal/left-wing politics whilst the herd/community immunity approach has been linked with conservative or right-wing politics.
In order to critically evaluate these issues two leading voices, Dr Tim Anderson and Dr Denis Rancourt, have been invited in order to rationally and respectfully explore these important issues. The proposition to be debated is as follows:-
Does SARS-COV-2 merit suppression measures in order to combat the virus rather than the herd/community immunity approach?
The aim is to help critically unpack the rationales, both political and scientific, that underlie these very different approaches. The debate will evolve over a period of time, with written online dialogue between Dr Anderson and Dr Rancourt.
OffGuardian are the official host for this debate and Dr Piers Robinson will undertake Chair responsibilities, ensuring rules of rational debate are followed.
About the participants…
Denis Rancourt
Denis Rancourt holds B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Physics (University of Toronto). He was a tenured Full Professor of physics at the University of Ottawa for 23 years.
Dr. Rancourt has been an invited plenary, keynote, or special session speaker at major scientific conferences some 40 times. He has published over 100 research papers in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, in the areas of physics, chemistry, geology, materials science, soil science, and environmental science.
He is a frequent media commentator. His medical, political and social theory articles and interviews are published in many venues, such as Dissident Voice.
His recent video interviews and reporting videos about the science of the COVID-19 epidemic and the science of face masks for preventing viral respiratory diseases have been viewed more than 2 million times, in both French and English.
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Tim Anderson
Tim Anderson is Director of the Sydney-based Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies. His PhD thesis (Macquarie University, 1997) was on economic liberalisation in Australia.
He worked as a lecturer and senior lecturer at Australian universities for more than 30 years, teaching, researching and publishing on: human rights in development, customary land in Melanesia, small farming and food security, health systems and infectious disease, Cuban medical internationalism, self-determination in development, independent regional integration and resistance to the wars of the 21st century.
In 2014 he was awarded Cuba’s medal of friendship. He is the Australia and Pacific representative for the Latin America based Network in Defence of Humanity.
His book ‘The Pandemic and Independent Countries’ will be published in late 2020..
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