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UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers speaks with Oxford epidemiologist Professor Sunetra Gupta – one of the three primary authors of the Great Barrington Declaration – to uncover why the UK’s massive £200 million COVID inquiry has produced a conclusion she calls an “insult” to the public intelligence. With the report claiming that locking down just one week earlier would have saved 23,000 lives, Gupta dismantles the modelling behind the headline and ask the questions the inquiry refused to: Why was the clear counter-evidence of Sweden ignored? And did the scientific establishment betray its own duties by choosing the certain harm of lockdown over the uncertain control of a virus?
I didn’t “lock down” last time, got out the country which was a cop out. I would happily go out on the streets next time and refuse to comply.
What Gupta is saying is that there was uncertainty. That’s it in a nutshell.
Freddie may be right to say that lockdowns had no beneficial effect (or he may be wrong), but his stake in the game is as editor of Unherd.
If Freddie had been the kind of person who became PM, what would he have done ?
You look at other countries. Do you single out Sweden in the early stages and say ‘business as usual’ ? As an Unherd editor you have your site at stake (maybe), as a PM you have millions at stake. Your advisors are all over the place, you are the leader.
I hate to say it, but Freddie is naive. He is a truly great presenter and editor however, keep it coming.
PS The report was useless and didn’t cover detrimental effects. True. A truly useful report would have covered the political conundrum and made receommendations perhaps. It could not have given any possible guidance for a future pandemic of completely uncertain character. Its up to our politicos, not our website editors.
I doubt if Powell or Thatcher would have buckled but Churchill, Heath and Cameron, certainly!
What do you mean by buckle ?
Capitulated to the ‘experts’ just as the Boris Beast so supinely did! QED?
To be fair to Boris, it is very difficult not to buckle to medical experts. It’s analogous to going to the doctor’s office and the doctor recommending on a particular course of treatment or inaction, or recommending a particular vaccine or other. Even if one is medically qualified oneself, the pressure to conform to one’s doctor’s advice is really high, and it takes a lot of guts and the strength of one’s own convictions to resist.
The days when politicians as young officers , of 18 or 19 years of age led their men over the top are long gone. G Wellum DFC writes about his squadron of 10 Spitfires taking on 150 German planes.
In The Battle of the Atlantic we were losing a ship an hour. When ships approached New York at night they were silhouetted by the lights for up to 5 hours and the U Boats were lying in wait. Of one convoy of oil tankers from Venezuela , comprising 11 ships, 10 were sunk- we did not give up. Sailors were burnt alive in the sea. Ships could not stop to pick up survivors . In fact because convoying was zig zagging to avoid U Boats, some ships sailed through sailors in the water, killing them. Watch the film The Cruel Sea. Sailors in the water were sacrificed to save ships.
The price of victory. The cost of our freedom.
Those who had proved themselves , could stand up and say” This disease is new. People will die but we will do out best to minmise the deaths “. Resources could have used to supply people over the age of 70 years and with diseases such as heart and diabetes in their homes while life continued. In fact this is what a top immunologist and one of the founders of the Jenner Institute said to me.
The problem throughout the Anglosphere was that all the governments decided that one set of experts — epidemiologists whose only focus was on preventing the spread of the disease — were the only ones to listen to. Experts in cost-benefit analysis in public health were ignored and even censored. Sweden is singled out because it is the only developed country to listen to the latter sort of expert, and ended up proving they were the right ones to list to, having a lower per capita COVID death rate than either the US or the UK (And no, it’s not because Sweden is a big, empty country. The US is a big, empty country. More of Sweden’s population lives in cities proportionally than either the US or the UK.) And they did it without the economic chaos lockdowns and the measure to mitigate their economic effects caused, and without blighting their childrens’ education with school closures (or online schooling, which effectively was little better than just giving them time off).
Neither you in the UK nor we in the US even got to debate the two approaches in Parliament or Congress, nor even amongst the public in social media. Lockdown it was. Gupta is correct, the report is an insult to the intelligence of the British public, and anyone who tries to use its conclusions for any purpose should be met with the questions: Why didn’t we do what Sweden did? How do you account for Sweden’s better outcomes?
Fortunately Sweden has invested most of its Government Pension scheme into two giant Green fiascos, so we have something to gloat about.
However otherwise you are correct, HM Government’s performance was absolutely appalling, and sadly continues in the same vein.
That the once great British public should have believed all this nonsense is hardly surprising given the horrors of state education, which 93% have to endure!
I believe your last sentence is actually incorrect. Yes state education, like public education in the US, is bad. But the problem was not with those you were not credentialed with fancy university degrees and doctorates, but precisely those who were highly credentialed and nominally highly intelligent. The vast majority of my colleagues, many of whom are also members of the US National Academy of Sciences (i.e. highly accomplished scientists) fully bought in to the narrative and panic and still do to this day. This includes the nonsense vis a vis masking, and the continual uptake of covid booster shots among this groups. All the more ironic, given that the boosters are ineffective, the technology has major deficiencies and dangers, and covid is now endemic and nothing more than a bad cold, no different from any other corona virus.
How very depressing and thank you.
I had always thought/hoped that most of those with a STEM background would take a more logical/pragmatic view, and that manic hysteria was the preserve of the Arts/ Humanities.
Thank you again for the correction!
Scientists depend upon taxpayer money. They have little status. Covid boosts their status and money. Very few of scientists were experts in virology and immunology. Gupta was an expert in viruses, Feguson had a doctorate in physics and like playing with numbers. Ferguson came up with 500,00 deaths. Johnson panicked. Guptas’ report came out a week later proving Ferguson was wrong but panic had set in.
Think of an army about to panic and run. A leader steps forward, steadies the nerves of the soldier and advances. We have not had this type of person government since we had people with combat experience. It is not about which school a person went to, it is about spirit.
In a situation like Covid one needs leaders like those at Kohima and Imphal or who commanded ships on Operation Pedestal or fought in the Battle of Britain.
But the other thing to bear in mind is that the so-called experts gaslighted the public the entire time. What they never mentioned, or the majority of the public never cottoned on to, was that all that mitigation (lockdowns, masking, 6ft rule, etc etc) can do is broaden the curve so that the peak height is reduced; but the area under the curve (i.e. the number of deaths and the number infected) remains completely unchanged and unaffected, no matter what one does. The rational, supposedly, was to reduce the burden on our healthcare system. Yet in NYC, even at the height of the 1st wave, the hospitals were never overloaded as they never made use of the Mercy ship or the field hospital that Trump put up.
Flattening the curve also delays the peak, whilst that might leave you with same number of infections it may well have had significant impact on deaths. Why? Because the delay allows lessons to be learned on how best to _treat_ the disease, lowering death rate. At start of the pandemic it was all about ventilators and how the UK had hardly any, turns out they were not the solution and may even have been part of the problem. Delaying the peak would mean more cases treated when this was known – if, hypothetically, it takes a month of experience to go from 50% death rate in ICU to 25% death rate, it will clearly result in fewer deaths overall if you can delay the peak for a month.
For an actual example, compare data for Australia and UK – Australia actually had _more_ cases per population than UK (_larger_ area under the curve), but they had them later. Australia death rate about 10% of the UKs. Australia locked down early hard and effectively, delayed the peaks and it appears it had far fewer deaths as a result. It wasn’t overall better health care or anything, the mortality rates (deaths/case) at each point in time look comparable in both countries, Australia just avoided the early really deadly peaks by delaying it.
Well numerous deaths could have been avoided if the proper treatments had been implemented: namely broad spectrum macrolide antibiotics for secondary bacterial pneumonia, and most importantly early use of oral prednisone for the cytokine storm (or iv dexamethasone if admitted to hospital). Those two interventions alone would have reduced the deaths in the elderly by orders of magnitude.
Well the problem was that the epidemiologists whose only focus was on preventing the spread of disease didn’t actual the basics and fundamentals of their disciplines, and they believed their models more than the actual data that was emerging. But the truth is that no matter how beautiful a theory or model may be, it only requires one negative observation to require a rethinking and revaluation of that model or theory. Either Einstein or Feynman or both said that but it is obvious and something that many arrogant scientists should be fully aware of. Unfortunately, all too many scientists, including the likes of Farrar, Fauci, Colines, Valance and Whitty, we carried away by their own hubris. And while these individuals resulted in massive societal harm, they were all promoted upwards by awards, elections to learned societies, knighthoods and lordships, and never held accountable and subsequently banished from all polite society.
Freddie, can you invite Baroness Hallett to be interviewed on your show?
I just thought I’d make a comment on Sunetra’s last thought which essentially advocated for scientists being more knowledgeable and cognizant with the arts, and their lack of this lead to their myopic thinking. While this may sound very laudable, that actually wan’t the issue. As a scientist, and a successful at that, the main issue is that so many scientists lack both common sense and street smarts. And it is precisely those two characteristics that often (not always) distinguish the really great scientists from the average ones. As an example, consider Ferguson’s modeling. Anybody with an ounce of common sense should know that the results of his modeling, no matter how sophisticated that model may be, is only as good as the input and assumptions made, given that there are so many unknowns. Further, while many seem to believe that the more complex a model the more quantitative and predictive it will be in its output, nothing could be further from the truth. What such model provide one with, and often times it is best to use the simplest models in this regard, is insight. i.e. if one makes an assumption about x, what will be the possible outcome. Now, if the assumption is wrong or quantitatively inaccurate, then the quantitative prediction power of the model will be wrong.
After listening to both episodes my first respose concerns the almost total absence of any serious consideration of the fact that as the virus was and is spread through human contact, either direct of indirect, then, if reducing that contact on a personal level right the way through to a national and international level, the spread of infections will be greatly reduced.
It’s almost as if Freddie Sayers and to a lesser extent Professor Sunetra Gupta, felt they had no personal responsibility at the time humanity was entering a pandemic, which seriously distorted this post-pandemic discussion and analysis.
Dear ALL: I wrote this comment to the Telegraph’s ‘lead’ article on the COVID Report. I got lots of ‘likes’ but only 2 replies. It seems trusting the British people is something everyone shies away from. I have spent 45 years as a new UK citizen (from USA) trying to persuade my fellows to buck-up, be brave, damn the torpedoes, and get on with it. It seems from the Bojo’s down to us plebs doubt the British people’s capacity to take responsibility for their society’s success. Shame.
MY COMMENT TO DT
Sweden Sweden Sweden?? Sunetra Gupta?? Barrington Declaration???
Am I alone on remembering how Bojo rejected listening to them? He rejected Gupta and Sweden because he had no faith in the British people’s capacity to follow simple advice. So what was HIS simple advice?: Sing Happy Birthday twice while washing hands!!
The utter class arrogance of Johnson’s ilk – i.e. ALL his public school lads – rejected the Swedish model because it relied on the public accepting governmental advice. Whereas the UK had designed the policy with the Swedes, this U-Turn inevitably lead to lockdowns. And, the damage from lockdowns isn’t some made-up 23,000 deaths. The real damage is the DOUBLING in government debt to £800Bn+, from which we will not recover for a generation.
Black Holes of £30Bn!! Rubbish. Try £400Bn!!