Sunetra Gupta, Oxford epidemiologist who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration in Covid years to advise focused protection instead of blanket interventions in the society, sits down with us to look back at the experience of Covid years and to draw some conclusions at where we are now. “Harms of lockdown remain very palpable,” she argues, pointing specifically to the all-time low of mental health amongst youth and children. Measures like lockdown should never have been attempted, she says, on the basis of a mere notion that ‘maybe’ they would help, while ignoring certain and enormous concurrent damage. Much of the Covid approach was simplistic, like presuming that that locking down part of the population will achieve an equal stop to the spread of the virus, which was a hope that was never realistic or true. Looking back at the Great Barrington Declaration which she co-authored, she says that pursuing its principles would have been the humane solution – protecting the vulnerable while allowing others to become infected and thus immune. “Instead we ended up harming the entire population,” Gupta opines, and says she doesn’t think we managed to avoid much of the harms of the virus itself regardless.
Her faith now lies with the next generation, for whom she hopes to leave behind enough data to analyse, as to what could have been done differently and what could have been the alternatives to the policies that came to be implemented. Unfortunately, she says, those who enforced policies like lockdowns are not willing to engage in any debate, and keep calling the harms inevitable – which they were not.
Please see also our full interview with Prof Sunetra Gupta, of which this is but an excerpt:
