Professor Gupta

[LadyLindaT]

May I just point out that this Oxford Professor who is all over the media at the moment is a Professor of Zoology?

It’s also clear that many over 60s who claim we should just shield the vulnerable have no intention of shielding themselves.

But some of their closest friends are shielding now and they're not going to start going out just because Charles Walker has been having a tantrum. So, this free for all utopia they're looking for isn't that likely to happen.

@Meadow1203

Professor Gupta and the thousands of other Scientists who top of their game make total sense. Lockdowns do not work. I am diabetic and have not been able to screened since March. I am also self employed and had no financial support. Enough already.

Professor Gupta, a small handful of maverick scientists and thousands of homeopaths and conspiracy theorists and people signing themself off as Dr Johnny Banana.....

@merrymouse

Professor Gupta should be careful. There are very powerful vested interests involved.

Careful of what? She hasn't revealed any great truth. It's absolutely fair and right to question any policy that restricts liberties, but talking vaguely about shielding without explaining how that would work doesn't help anyone, least of all any government that has to come up with a workable policy.

The powerful vested interests are in support of Prof Gupta. This is partly why her unconvincing ideas have got so much airtime.

(Sunetra Gupta) "has repeatedly claimed since the beginning of the year that we may have reached herd immunity. In March, she and her team released a paper that suggested that more than half the UK’s population had already had Covid, which she has continued to defend since.

In May she gave an interview to Unherd claiming that “Covid is on the way out”:

I think that the epidemic has largely come and is on its way out in this country so I think [the Infection Fatality Rate] would be definitely less than 1 in 1000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000. That would be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%.

By this point, 36,000 had died of Covid in the UK. If 100% of the UK’s population had had Covid by then, the UK would have had to have a population of 360 million people for her low-end IFR estimate to be right. (She did, after being challenged by the interviewer, then change this to 0.05%. This would mean a population of 120 million at a herd immunity level of 60%, which Gupta actually claims may be much higher than the true level.)

She continued to argue over the summer that we may already have herd immunity. "
sambowman.substack.com/p/covid-the-war-we-never-fought

royalsociety.org/topics-policy/diversity-in-science/parent-carer-scientist/sunetra-gupta/

www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-sunetra-gupta#tab-1868336

"My main area of interest is the evolution of diversity in pathogens, with particular reference to the infectious disease agents that are responsible for malaria, influenza and bacterial meningitis. I use simple mathematical models to generate new hypotheses regarding the processes that determine the population structure of these pathogens. I work closely with laboratory and field scientists both to develop these hypotheses and to test them."

The title of one paper may come back to bite her on the arse

"Increased frequency of travel in the presence of cross-immunity may act to decrease the chance of a global pandemic.

2019 | Journal article |Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences"