Oxford team lead, Professor Sunetra Gupta, shares their Corona Virus study. She gives us her thoughts on the worldwide travel, a second wave of infection in London or New York, media censorship of their dissenting opinion, and the level of herd immunity.
She felt heavily censored after the high virus mortality rates were predicted- all other opposing views from epidemiologists (like those on her Oxford team) did not appear in the press.
She thinks worldwide travel is safe and good, and actually prevents pandemic outbreaks due to exposing everyone to new things all the time. (People who haven’t been exposed to a certain illness don’t exist in isolated pockets anymore, due to worldwide travel.) She notes that we haven’t seen a 1918 Flu pandemic since then… I would add that in the late 1700’s they happened every few years own Europe.
She says that we have immunity to this Corona Virus due to previous exposure to previous Corona viruses. (Yay! Learning immune system!!)
Prof. Gupta feels we may have herd immunity at 25% infection rate for this reason. [Other sources in the JBHandleyBlog.com write that it may be 10-15%. See one of the three Lockdown Lunacy articles.]
She feels that counting and publishing only case numbers (especially by country) is less helpful than other data. See the quotes below.
She believes that a lot of London and New York City will NOT have a second wave. She thinks that herd immunity will come much lower than the proposed 70% infection rate (due to 3 paragraphs back).
She also thought that looking at everything through a country by country “numbers race” has been unhelpful. She would rather look at it as a worldwide model view.
On Disagreeing with the Media and Other Predicting Epidemiologists:
“At the moment, I personally feel that the calumny that’s been heaped on us that dare to disagree with what is believed to be a communitarian imperative, but to my mind is utterly individualistic, is really quite scary. It’s been very tough.”
“…What you see regularly in articles and opinion pieces is this idea that herd immunity has to be over 70% at least and only 5% of the population has been exposed. That is still a possibility…There is also the possibility…that a large swathe of the population has been exposed. Some have become immune, and therefore exhibit antibodies, or don’t because those antibodies have decayed. And some were resistant to start with. Under those circumstances, no, we shouldn’t see a huge surge in infections in those regions like London and New York where we’ve had a major incidence of infection and death.”
Question: “Mutaz: At the start of the crisis, some epidemiologists seemed more concerned about predicting deaths than working out immunity. Do you think some public-facing scientists contributed to the sense of terror and fear in an unreasonable way?
Answer: You could argue that was the worst case scenario, and they felt that that was what they needed to present to the government. After that, there was no further consideration. The debate was interrupted. Any attempt that I made to keep that debate alive and to try and get the right data on board to make decisions, was essentially ignored.
Answer: And if anything, we came up for a lot of censure, and we were told we were doing something dangerous, which is really rather heartbreaking because right from the beginning we’ve all been very concerned about the effects of lockdown on underprivileged people, both in this country and globally.
So it hurts when we’re told we’re doing something dangerous.”
To read the full article interview with Oxford Professor Guptra, click here: