After eight full months of the global pandemic, the pressure to keep economies open and let the chips (or rather, the elderly) fall where they may is growing strong.

The Great Barrington Declaration of Oct. 4 was signed by three medical professors from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford universities and by tens of thousands of other people. It demands a return to “life as normal” — no mention of masks, social distancing, contact tracing or COVID-19 tests — for everybody except “the vulnerable,” who would presumably self-isolate semipermanently.

Never mind that the sponsor is the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think-tank funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and other hard-right American groups whose main business is climate change denial.