Jeffrey Tucker is the editorial director of an American libertarian think tank, the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER). AIER helped in the drafting and facilitation of the Great Barrington Declaration, so-named after the town the AIER is located in.

Tucker has been an arch-critic of lockdown policies, engaging in what appears to be unfortunate motivated reasoning in attempting to argue for a more hands-off approach to living with the virus. This has included: prematurely declaring herd immunity had been achieved in various U.S. states and other countries, playing down the health risks of the disease, misrepresenting or selectively highlighting the policy approach of countries with low COVID-19 death rates, spreading misinformation about the accuracy of COVID-19 diagnostic tests, predicting that vaccines wouldn't ever be rolled out, and describing vaccines as "potions."

In April 2020, he tweeted "Headed out to contribute to herd immunity. You stay-at-home people are prolonging pain and killing people." The tweet has since been deleted. His book Liberty or Lockdown, released in October 2020, opens with a foreword by George Gilder that reads "By late April 2020, with reports of plummeting death rates from all causes, the Covid-19 crisis was already essentially over."

Example contributions

"The only thing New York did right was reach herd immunity faster than anyone else because the virus got there early and it swept through before the lockdowns."

Twitter, July 19, 2020

"If you follow C19 data, seems like same story everywhere. Big burst kills old/sick average 80 plus. Virus spreads. Deaths fall dramatically. After approx. 20% of a regional population gets it, infection rate falls too, and then it goes away. Exceptions?"

Twitter, July 21, 2020

"oh you can look it up but just off the cuff, Sweden and the Northeast of the US. Most of Europe too, ok just randomly Italy is attached. It's just a pretty picture of herd immunity. Policy doesn't matter."

Twitter, July 21, 2020

"Arizona seems to have reached herd immunity,"

Twitter, August 5, 2020

"Nothing makes sense. These graphs are NY, no virus. Herd immunity. Still, mask mandates, no indoor dining, no Broadway (grrrr), business suffering, cops enforcing distancing, elevators useless, no arts, and disgusting controls everywhere. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?"

Twitter, August 12, 2020

"South Korea stayed open and had 6 deaths per million."

Twitter, August 15, 2020. (NB: South Korea has very tough health border controls, a surgical approach to identify and isolate those infected and used intrusive tracking mechanisms – including phone location data and credit card records – to track, trace and isolate. It is misleading to suggest they just "stayed open.")

"Here's something weird. The UK, where the virus has been effectively gone for 2.5 months but the lockdowns and freak out still continue, has charts that look almost the same as never-locked-down Sweden where everyone is today maskless and happily socially closening."

Twitter, August 19, 2020

"It's almost as if the virus spreads more readily in lockdown, precisely as every study has thus far shown. But opening up is a lot less fun for would-be dictators."