Times Radio – Sunetra Gupta – Rod Liddle.

Rod Liddle  00:00

One of those who did dare to question this burgeoning madness was Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, who was one of the high profile academics who held throughout the pandemic that our governments had got it wrong. And Sunetra joins me now. Thanks so much for joining me on the program. We did get it wrong, didn’t we?

SG  00:23

Yes, we did. But of course, it has to be seen in the context of what was known then and what was not known. Chris Whitty has already done the job of explaining what one of the biggest thing that wasn’t known, which is whether it was possible to stop the spread of the virus using non pharmaceutical interventions like lockdowns, and indeed, what would be the ultimate purpose of that? You can stop it for a while, but then it’ll just come back again. You could also make the argument, if you stop it for a while, you might get ahead with preparing to deal with it when it resurfaces, so there are arguments both ways. But fundamentally, there were huge uncertainties in, first of all, how far we were into the first wave of this pandemic, and absolutely on whether lockdowns would work. But there was, in my opinion, very little uncertainty as to the harms that lockdowns were likely to cause. So there was certainty in the harm, and less certainty – almost no certainty – in what they would achieve, whether they would achieve their intended goals of stopping the spread. And the one other thing we could be more or less certain about is that you can reduce the risk to an individual by shielding them. So within the context of these certainties and uncertainties, the logical solution was to try and focus our efforts and our limited resources into protecting those who are vulnerable, about which we had a pretty clear idea already. So that was another thing that was known. So in the balance of what was certain – where we had certainty and where we didn’t have certainty – the logical solution seemed to be to focus protection, and to have a system of state supported individual risk reduction for those who were vulnerable while allowing the epidemic to take its natural course.  That’s what we would do anyway, if the lockdowns didn’t work, although the most critical point here is the avoidance of the harms that lockdowns caused -which you’ve already enumerated.

RL  02:50

In that febrile time at the end of February, beginning of March 2020, when this virus, which got hyperbolic press attention across the world, was making its way here, we never really got to understand what its lethality was and who it was that was at risk. 

SG  03:41

That could be a defense of what was done then, but I think it’s a rather poor defense, because there was sufficient data already on the stratification of risk. We knew that the elderly were at risk, and also people with certain comorbidities, and one could certainly have erred on the side of caution and recommended risk reduction to people who might consider themselves to be of risk, even if that wasn’t necessarily evident in the data. The other point is that it is not true that the epidemic had not arrived by the end of February. We don’t know that. In fact, I would say, if you tried to fit a mathematical model to what had happened, it’s very, very likely that the epidemic had already arrived. And you know, common sense. Look how many planes come in from Wuhan, or indeed the rest of China, into this country and elsewhere in the world. The likelihood that it hadn’t arrived until March is, I would say, vanishingly small. So what we were potentially looking at was an epidemic that had substantially swept through some parts of the country anyway, and certainly there was no signal that it was going to cause a lot of death in any sector of the population, other than those who were the known vulnerable.

RL  05:21

Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s interesting, isn’t it? We look back from a distance of five years and try to compare its lethality, or its severity, at least to the flu outbreak, which we had at Christmas this year, where which was lasting five or six days, and just from anecdotal reports, people were saying it was far, far worse than the than the COVID variant which they got in. You know, June 2020, why? Why do you think we became so gripped? What were the mechanisms which made us go down this route towards lockdowns and continue staggered lockdowns, rather than keeping an open mind and trying to assess as things went on. 

SG  06:10

I mean, first of all, comparing flu and COVID or any particular pandemic with any other disease is fundamentally flawed because the other diseases are at endemic equilibrium. So there were many errors of judgment made just in doing that. But I think what actually happened with the lockdowns is something I call narrative collapse. So here I’m moving away from the science, but talking about, you know, the evolution of narrative, and narrative can, you know, lead to knowledge. So you have “knowledge” on one hand and on the other hand you have “doxa”. Science is obviously part of “knowledge”, and all other forms of critical thinking belong in this sphere of knowledge. Knowledge is all about questioning everything. And somehow our thinking on COVID veered into this other sort of category of narrative, which is doxa, where you can’t question anything. And that is, of course, very dangerous, and it leads eventually to narrative collapse, which is evident in all these sort of performative and hugely illogical activities that then it disintegrated into. And I think it’s very important that we remember what happened. And we’ve set up a charity called Collateral Global, which we are hoping will act as a kind of museum, a kind of record of what happened. People are very reluctant to even think back on this painful period but, like many other painful periods, it’s actually really important that we have a record of this – not to use in order to cast aspersions and assign blame and all of that horrible game that seems to carry on, but really so that when next time something like this happens that we have something to go back to and say, well, how did that work out then? What did lockdowns actually achieve? Did they achieve their stated aim, and what kind of harms were caused? I mean, people said children are resilient, they’ll be fine. But you know, I think it was so obvious that children, especially children who are deprived, would suffer tremendously from any deprivation when it came to education. Someone who only gets their one hot meal of the day at school is not going to thrive if we don’t let them go to school. It’s pretty obvious.

RL  09:02

And just very, very briefly indeed, apologies for running out of time, we need to be open about everything when this sort of stuff happens, and that surely involves vaccines as well, and their effort, not merely their efficacy, but also the possible damage which they could do. We weren’t really open about that, either. Were we? 

SG  09:25

Well, I think the vaccines did what they said on the tin. Actually, they were good at saving lives of vulnerable people. So vaccines, just like natural immunity to any coronavirus, give you immunity against severe disease, but they don’t stop infection. And somehow people got it into their heads that it was going to stop infection, and therefore it was deployed in a way that, to me, was unacceptable, because obviously there’s a very small risk with any vaccination, and young people who were not at any risk of getting the disease and wouldn’t stop transmitting it when vaccinated, should not have been asked to take that risk, however small it might be.

RL  10:16

Sunetra Gupta, thank you so much for joining me this morning.