There are plenty of experts and health officials who believe that eradicating the pandemic is possible. Including some with experience eradicating other pandemics like Ebola and Zika [1], along with the editor-in-chief of the Lancet [2], among others.
Eradicating a pandemic is not unprecedented, it can and has been done.
> If you've gotten the impression that our public health response is about reaching some future point where Covid-19 is gone and nobody ever has to worry about it, you're being misled.
Clearly our COVID19 response is not currently about that, or no one would have to advocate for it.
[1]:https://necsi.edu/corona-virus-pandemic. (Ebola: https://necsi.edu/ending-pandemics)
I have to concede that he's not a crank, and appears to have meaningful pandemic expertise. I'm now aware of one expert who's confident eliminating Covid is possible. But this has to be evaluated in the context of the overwhelming consensus (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00396-2) that it's probably not, and these sites are structured as grand calls to action more than detailed arguments, so it's hard for me to figure out what the content of the disagreement is. What does Bar-Yam know that immunologists don't?
As for the disagreement, it probably stems from the fact that with other outbreaks like Ebola, with known ~50% mortality rates, there’s unanimous consensus that they must be shut down early, and so they are.
That common cause and singled-minded focus and coordination is a major factor in successfully eradicating the pandemic. And doing it early before it can become widespread is obviously more viable than shutting it down after it’s gone global.
These folks are asserting that the methodologies used for shutting down other pandemics early can still be effectively scaled up to shut down a widespread pandemic like COVID19 that we failed to shut down early. And that’s where the disagreement is with the consensus you linked.
The thing is, global pandemics aren’t over, they’re just beginning, and we could be hit by something worse later. It behooves all of society to use COVID19 as a not-too-deadly trial run for learning how to quickly shut down something worse in the future, rather than fatalistically accepting it.
I think this is the core thing that I've never understood about the zero covid idea. If you look at, say, France or Spain, there was a unanimous consensus that the coronavirus must be stopped early, with strong and severe lockdowns for 5-6 weeks as these sites outline. The consensus didn't break because of laziness or complacency; it broke because it didn't work, because the lockdowns reduced but never eliminated community transmission. If you have a disease that's not that bad in the scheme of things, and you try the best known suppression strategies but they don't get rid of it, what other option is there than to find a way to live with it?
I also think it's important to acknowledge that our efforts to fight Ebola have not generally been this strong, despite Bar-Yam's arguments that they should be. In 2014, some American states imposed mandatory quarantines on doctors and nurses who'd been treating Ebola patients in western Africa, and there was strong pushback - from medical experts, who said that the quarantines were stigmatizing and counterproductive and there's no medical reason to impose such an over-the-top policy. "The Ebola quarantines and other movement restrictions put in place throughout the nation beginning in late 2014 were motivated by fear and by politics, not by medical science", said Doctors Without Borders.
Their critique of most of those cases is the measures were lifted prematurely, before getting all the way to zero infection rate, allowing it to re-spread again. And also the fact that all adjoining countries need the same zero-covid policy, or even ones that get to zero covid can be reinfected by neighbors. It's all (the way to zero), or nothing.