The Independent piece is talking about some of the 150,000+ names signed by the public. Of course people on the Internet are going to add fake names to the list. That doesn't make the declaration fake.

The Politifact piece explicitly notes that the official signatories are real. It then goes into an explanation of why their heterodox opinion is wrong, which maybe it is. But that doesn't make it fake.

Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations.

Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.

Huber, Gary. Chief of Respiratory Diseases at Boston City Hospital’s Harvard Medical Unit

Kilpatrick, James. Biostatistics. Medical College of Virginia, Richmond, VA

Wexler, Lawrence M. Epidemiology @ New York Medical College, Valhalla, NY

Wu, Joseph M. Biochemistry, molecular biology @ New York Medical College, Valhalla, NY

Ecobichon, Donald. Toxicology @ McGill University, Quebec, QC

These are all people who wrote in favour of tobacco not causing cancer in individuals for the tobacco lobby. There were many other equally credentialed individuals who also said so. If you put enough money in front of an unscrupulous individual, no matter their background, they'll tell you whatever you want to hear.

The volume of support is of course dubious as the only requirement for saying that a "medical professional" was signing it, was a check box on a web form.

the challenge I see with the declaration's approach is that (AFAIK) it skips over the hard part of how "Focused Protection." is actually implemented.

It's super easy to write a web page saying that we should use "focused protection" to avoid heavy loss of life to Covid, and much much harder to design and implement a workable strategy.

This article actually demonstrates that problem. A worker at a care facility spread it to a set of vulnerable people. How would "focused protection" have stopped that? There may be an answer, but I don't see that information from the Great Barrington declaration.

That's a reasonable criticism, but I would point out that the "responsible" strategy of trying to force entire populations into quarantine has not survived contact with reality either.

A worker at a care facility spread it to a set of vulnerable people

The worker should have been living on site, or if that's not possible seeing literally nobody outside of their job. And we should be paying them huge amounts of money to compensate for that disruption.