Prof. Sunetra Gupta: The lost lessons of lockdown

Summary

UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

Episode: Prof. Sunetra Gupta: The Lost Lessons of Lockdown
Date: November 22, 2025
Host: Freddie Sayers
Guest: Prof. Sunetra Gupta (Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, University of Oxford)

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Episode Overview

This episode is a deep-dive conversation with Prof. Sunetra Gupta on the findings of the official UK Covid inquiry. Gupta, an early and outspoken critic of blanket lockdown policies, discusses her disappointment with the inquiry’s conclusions, challenges prevailing assumptions, and reflects on the broader political and societal implications of how pandemic decisions were made. The discussion critically examines the evidence (or lack thereof) for the effectiveness of lockdowns, the handling of scientific debate, and the loss of nuance in public health decision-making.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Disappointment in the COVID Inquiry’s Findings

• Gupta’s Central Critique: The UK’s official COVID inquiry, costing nearly £200 million, failed to analytically assess competing hypotheses about the course of the pandemic and the impacts of different approaches—notably, it omitted detailed comparisons between countries like Sweden and the UK.
  • Quote: “What I really feel is a sense of great disappointment on behalf of the British public... What you’d want, I think, to happen... is an analysis of these data, to have people put forward their views... and then to look at the evidence to see how much they support a particular hypothesis.” (03:48)

2. The Case of Sweden & Absence of Proper Comparison

• Selective Reporting: Sayers and Gupta criticize the inquiry for dismissing the Swedish case, misrepresenting Sweden as having similar measures to other countries rather than acknowledging its lack of a mandatory lockdown.
  • Sayers: "...Sweden is mentioned a few times mainly to disparage the idea that Sweden did not have a lockdown... There is no sincere engagement with the logic of lockdowns." (05:07)
  • Gupta: “It’s an insult, really, I think, to the general public, who have... paid quite a lot of money for this to happen.” (05:51)

3. Questioning the Central “Too Little, Too Late” Narrative

• Critique of Modelling Arguments: Gupta strongly contests the inquiry’s claim that imposing lockdown a week earlier would have saved 23,000 lives, arguing that such definitive conclusions from modelling are unfounded.
  • Gupta: “I do not believe modeling can establish any of those facts... It can’t be used as a sort of crystal ball to tell you exactly how many lives would have been saved.” (07:58)
  • She also notes limited evidence for lockdowns’ strong effect on transmission: "...the evidence is quite limited, to be polite." (08:53)

4. Did Lockdowns Make a Difference?

• Questioning Efficacy: Gupta points to data across countries that show waves of infection rising and falling in similar patterns irrespective of varying lockdown policies.
  • Gupta: “It’s very clear from statistical analysis that the cases had started coming down before the lockdowns were implemented... It doesn’t mean to say that lockdowns had no effect... but what we should be doing is sitting around a table and discussing these options and weighing the evidence for and against.” (09:02–10:25)
• Key Mechanisms at Play: She argues the most parsimonious explanation is the combination of population immunity (herd immunity) and seasonality, not mandatory NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions).
  • “…now, as you’ve just said, we have a whole range of data... and we can see that it follows very closely the pattern that would be predicted by a very simple model in which you acquire immunity, you lose it, you acquire it again. That’s the nature of coronaviruses, but overlaid on that is the seasonality in transmission.” (16:00)

5. Philosophical & Political Blindness

• Societal Impact of Mandates: Sayers and Gupta highlight the lack of reflection on the magnitude of top-down social interventions.
  • Sayers: “To try to rewrite all of society... is an incredibly radical, incredibly interventionist and risky thing to do... You would think that you should only attempt such a thing if you’re very certain that it was going to work and... you’re constantly monitoring the effects.” (19:23)

6. Inversion of the Precautionary Principle

• Lockdown Harms Known, Effectiveness Uncertain:
  • Gupta: “While people keep saying that, ‘oh, this was just an application of the precautionary principle’, in fact it was an inversion of the precautionary principle... The only thing we were certain about... is that lockdowns would cause enormous harm... What we were uncertain about, and remain so... was whether these interventions would actually have any effect on the spread of the epidemic...” (20:30)

7. No Viable Logic for an Earlier Lockdown

• Sayers and Gupta analyze both the “keep COVID out” and “flatten the curve” rationales, concluding they were not applicable in the UK context, as hospitals were not overrun and the virus was already widespread.
  • Sayers: “So I just cannot... understand what the logic of locking down a week earlier would have been, can you?” (23:37)
  • Gupta: “Absolutely not... there was a sort of... narrative collapse, particularly in the second lockdown.” (25:58)
• Gupta also delineates three types of lockdown logic (prevention, 'noble' containment, and slowing spread), arguing none applied to the UK.

8. The Political and Ethical Dimensions

• Loss of Debate & Authoritarian Drift:
  • Gupta: “What happens when you just throw away, what is it, 300 billion, 400 billion. How much did we spend?... Look at what's happening to our younger generation now. It cannot be worth it.” (31:26)
  • Both critique the totalitarian logic behind extreme population containment proposals.
  • Gupta: “Where is the debate?” (31:26)
• Great Barrington Declaration and Focused Protection: Gupta and Sayers discuss the concept of focused protection for the vulnerable as a neglected alternative.
  • Sayers: “…It’s a major political step to suddenly say that the role of the government is to mandate for everyone how they should choose to respond to an emerging health threat...” (33:23)
  • Gupta: “There are three axes on which we need to think about this... the logos, the pathos, and the ethos... The ethos... is how do we want to live our lives?” (34:47)

9. The Narrowness of Scientific Authority

• Need for Broad Critical Thinking:
  • Sayers: “It’s also interesting... those dissenting experts... were kind of cross disciplinary... and it’s also interesting... [Jonathan] Sumption... is not myopic or narrow in what he judges to be important.” (36:16)
  • Gupta: “You cannot be just an actor or just a theoretician or just an immunologist. We all exist within a framework... our goal is to live the best possible, the richest lives we can live...” (37:37)
  • She highlights the problem of allowing narrowly educated experts to dominate far-reaching social decisions.

10. Closing Thoughts

• The Importance of Maintaining Humanity:
  • Sayers: “If we have any hope at the end of this rather depressing experience... it’s that [Gupta] has managed to maintain her humanity despite being traduced and attacked and dismissed...” (40:13)
  • Gupta: “My pleasure as always.” (40:10)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Gupta: "I do not believe modeling can establish any of those facts." (07:58)
• Gupta: "It’s really disappointing to see them being brushed aside with very flippant comments about... Sweden." (05:51)
• Gupta: “What we should have done earlier is to put in place a state supported system of individual risk reduction for those who are vulnerable. But because we know that works... What we didn’t have evidence of... was that this would scale up to the population level...” (16:00)
• Gupta: “The only thing we were certain about... is that lockdowns would cause enormous harm... What we were uncertain about... was whether these interventions would actually have any effect on the spread of the epidemic.” (20:30)
• Sayers: “If the government told me to lock down again, I would say no, basically... if they try anything like this again... I will go straight out onto the streets and just flatly refuse to lock down.” (29:20)
• Gupta: “Even if [lockdowns] do work... lockdowns cause enormous harm. And this is something we could have anticipated.” (30:26)
• Gupta: “You cannot be just an actor or just a theoretician or just an immunologist... our goal is to live the best possible, the richest lives we can live... and make sure that... generations to come will be able to enjoy that.” (37:37)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Dissecting the Inquiry’s Approach – 03:25–05:51
• Problems with Modelling and Counterfactual Claims – 07:58–09:44
• Were Lockdowns Effective? Competing Hypotheses – 09:02–11:35
• Nature of Viral Waves & Herd Immunity Plus Seasonality – 16:00–19:23
• Ethical/Political Blindspots, Inversion of Precaution – 19:23–23:37
• Was There Ever a Logic for Locking Down Earlier? – 23:37–28:40
• Personal & Political Stand Against Lockdowns – 29:20–31:26
• Focused Protection and the Ethos of Public Health Response – 33:23–36:16
• Value of Broad Critical Thinking and Multidisciplinary Perspective – 36:16–39:38
• Closing Reflections – 39:38–40:13

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Concluding Message

The episode makes a powerful case for humility, open scientific debate, and broader critical thinking in the face of crisis. Gupta and Sayers argue that the core lessons of lockdown have been lost in official narratives, replaced by a narrow focus on infection numbers and an unwillingness to admit uncertainty or debate alternatives—at the cost of ignoring massive social and ethical ramifications. Both call for public resistance if similar policies are proposed in the future and stress the importance of preserving not just life but the kind of society in which we want to live.

Transcript

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[Freddie Sayers]

Hello again and welcome back to Unherd. If you made it through the last episode, that was me just explaining my reaction to the new Covid inquiry that landed this week. But if you feel like the opinions of a YouTube journalist and editor are not very interesting on a scientific matter, totally fair enough. You might have skipped straight to part two, which is what we're doing now. Because right now we are joined by Professor Sunetra Gupta, professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford and an old friend of this show. Because I fear, as I said in the last episode, we might have actually been partially responsible for how you were dragged into this very public, kind of chaotic argument around Covid. You were having a nice time as a very prestigious and successful professor in Oxford and I said, why don't you come on my YouTube show to tell us what you think about lockdowns? And suddenly you said, yes. And after that, life was a bit different. So welcome back to the show, Sunetra Gupta.

[Professor Sunetra Gupta]

Thank you, Freddie. Very nice to be back on.

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[Freddie Sayers]

We've had this report. It cost nearly £200 million so far. The latest installment is over 800 pages long. They've had over 100 witness statements and it's been a huge production that is supposed to be the official state. Lessons learned from COVID what's your reaction to what the headline findings have been so far?

[Professor Sunetra Gupta]

Well, I of course have my personal opinion of what drove the dynamics of the virus and what we could have done. But what I really feel is a sense of great disappointment on behalf of the British public because I would have thought that the minimum that a British taxpayer would expect from this kind of an exercise is an assessment of competing hypotheses, competing explanations for the data that we now have. I mean, five years ago we didn't know how this is going to pan out. Now we have data from the uk, we have data from other countries who did other things. And what you'd want, I think, to happen in front of your eyes is an analysis of these data to have people put forward their views about what actually happened and how we could have prevented it, and then to look at the evidence to see how much they support a particular hypothesis, what there is for and against particular explanations. And that's what would have put us in a good place to tackle further eventuality of this sort.

[Freddie Sayers]

And it's just not there, is it? It's strange I said in the part one that Sweden is mentioned a few times mainly to try and disparage the idea that Sweden did not have a lockdown. The one quote they include from Anders Tegnel is saying how many measures they took in order to sort of gloss over the fact that there was never a mandatory lockdown in Sweden. It feels very motivated reasoning. And yeah, there is no table of comparators. There is no sincere engagement with the logic of lockdowns. It doesn't appear to me or kind of questioning whether it was too late at all to try to contain or eliminate the virus at that stage. These fundamental questions are just missing.

[Professor Sunetra Gupta]

Exactly. So there is very little analytical Discussion. When I say analytical discussion, that may sound rather specialist, but actually it's not. And in fact, I think throughout this period, one of the things that's happened is that the public have been dismissed in terms of their ability to understand some of these basic processes. What happens when a new virus comes into a population? How does immunity build up? What effect does seasonality have? What effect does behavior change have? These are all, I think, fairly, completely accessible concepts and it is really disappointing to see them being brushed aside with, you know, very kind of, as you say, flippant comments about, oh, well, you know, actually Sweden did really lock down anyway. They just said they didn't, but they actually did. It's an insult, really, I think, to the general public, who have, as you say, paid quite a lot of money for this to happen.

[Freddie Sayers]

The key couple of paragraphs, the bit that is leading to all of these front pages, I've got them here in front of me. The quote is too little, too late. That's the Guardian headline. But most newspapers, I mean, the Times and looking at inexcusable pandemic delays, cost 23,000 lives. The paragraph that is leading to all of those from front pages is this one. I'm going to read it out once again. The inquiry recognises that the lockdown decision was as difficult a decision as any UK government or devolved administration has ever had to make. However, the inquiry accepts the consensus of the evidence before it that the mandatory lockdown should have been imposed one week earlier, had a mandatory lockdown been imposed on or immediately after 16th of March 2020. Modelling has established that the number of deaths in England in the first wave up until 1st of July 2020 would have been reduced by 48%, equating to approximately 23,000 fewer deaths. That is the finding. What is your response?

[Professor Sunetra Gupta]

I do not believe modeling can establish any of those facts. Modeling is a fabulous conceptual tool. I use it all the time. Right now I'm developing a flu vaccine based on the results of a mathematical model. So, you know, it is a conceptual tool that can have very profound translational consequences. Unfortunately, it can't be used as a sort of crystal ball to tell you exactly how many lives would have been saved or what might have ensued if one had locked down earlier or later. Moreover, this is all based on the assumption that locking down actually did have a material effect on the spread of the virus, for which, at the moment, I would say the evidence is quite limited, to be polite.

[Freddie Sayers]

Well, let's dig into that. Your view, then, five years later, is that it's not even clear that lockdowns made much difference.

[Professor Sunetra Gupta]

That's correct. I mean, I think that five years ago when we had our first interview, it was very much, there was a big question mark around whether lockdowns might work and indeed the extent to which locking down had caused a turnover in cases and deaths. As we saw in March, that debate still rages because it's very clear from statistical analysis that the cases had started coming down before the lockdowns were implemented. Died. It doesn't mean to say that lockdowns had no effect on the risk of infection, the risk of spread.

[Freddie Sayers]

Why is that fact not included in this report? I mean, I'm sure it's a contested fact and there may be people who dispute it, but it is a widely shared claim, put it that way, by large numbers of prestigious scientists in the field, that the infections were already coming down in the week prior to the mandatory lockdown here in the UK being implemented. That is a kind of complete torpedo into this whole central argument that we should have locked down a week earlier. In fact, it's more evidence in your direction, which is that maybe the lockdown even a week later or at any point didn't really make that much difference.

[Professor Sunetra Gupta]

Indeed, I mean, I think there are even within that competing hypothesis. So you might say some people believe that spontaneous behavior change was what caused a decline in infections, whereas I would be more inclined to say that the buildup of herd immunity coupled with seasonality is the more parsimonious explanation for what happened. And as I said, it doesn't completely exclude some effect of the lockdowns. But I guess what I'm trying to underscore is the fact that what we should be doing is sitting around a table and discussing these options and weighing the evidence for and against these different ideas and that's not happening. I'm happy to say that I did engage in such a discussion with the Scottish Covid inquiry a couple of months ago and I found that to be much more mature and forward looking in its practice. And I think that's what was missing from the UK inquiry.

[Freddie Sayers]

Do you think we could go as far as to say that actually five years on from COVID the evidence is that these so called non pharmaceutical interventions, which is basically trying to control the spread of a virus by telling people what they can and can't do, doesn't really have that much effect on the waves of a virus. I mean, you and I were looking throughout those five year periods at charts of different countries, Sweden, the uk, other European countries, And very often the waves came and went all together, no matter what the differing policies of those governments were. I mean, when I was in Sweden in spring of 2020, the numbers were dramatically coming down throughout that period, and yet there was no lockdown. It's almost like the exact opposite conclusion to what this inquiry has found is the correct one, which is not oh, we should have tried to do more. We should have tried to control society more. You know, in a more hardcore way. We should have tried to dictate the outcome of the virus, but with more restrictions. It's the opposite. It's like, try as you might, these viruses will come and go and the best you can do is protect yourself as best as you're able. But you can't control viruses.

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[Professor Sunetra Gupta]

Well, that is certainly my opinion. As you know, I think that this idea that you can actually control the spread of a virus in a population arises from a number of fallacies. One of those is that you can scale up individual risk reduction to a population level. What I mean by that is that we know that if you stay at home and reduce your contacts drastically and get your shopping delivered, that you are actually effectively reducing your risk. And this is what I think should have been recommended earlier. That's what we should have done earlier is to put in place a state supported system of individual risk reduction for those who are vulnerable. But because we know that works, it's just logical and it does work. There's also evidence now from various studies that it works. What we didn't have evidence of at the time when it was rolled out, lockdowns were rolled out, these NPIs were rolled out, was that this would scale up to the population level, meaning that everyone staying at home would actually mean the virus itself didn't spread in the population. The reason for that is because actually the spread of a virus in the population is quite complex. And while at one extreme if everyone does stay at home, then it surely won't spread. But of course, and then at the other extreme, if everyone just goes about their business, it will spread as usual. But the question is, what happens in between? If half the people stay at home, will the spread just be halved? Will the rate of spread be halved? And that's actually, we didn't know at the time whether that would happen. And now as you just very clearly laid out from all the data, it is pretty clear that that's not a logical assumption. And what is much more likely to have happened is a very straightforward, from a modeling point of view, combination of the buildup of immunity in the population combined with seasonality. I think when I first came on the show, I talked a lot about herd immunity, but. But in hindsight, what I should have really said is that it's a combination of the buildup of herd immunity and seasonality that actually produces the patterns that we see. Obviously, at the time, all we knew was that infections were going down, but now, as you've just said, we have a whole range of data from a range of countries and we can see that it follows very closely the pattern that would be predicted by a very simple model in which you acquire immunity, you lose it, you acquire it again. That's the nature of coronaviruses, but overlaid on that is the seasonality in transmission, meaning that there are months when the virus doesn't transmit very well and there are months when it does. And that explains not just coronavirus, all coronaviruses before that we've lived with for a long time, a range of other respiratory infections and now SARS. Covid 2. Surprise, surprise has fallen into that pattern as well.

[Freddie Sayers]

It feels like there's almost a philosophical absence in this report of thinking about the political or the wider questions around making these kinds of decisions. Because, for example, to try to rewrite all of society, reconstruct centuries of patterns of behavior, all from the top down, is an incredibly radical, incredibly interventionist and risky thing to do. You would think that you should only attempt such a thing if you're very certain that it was going to work and that you've really thought about how to get out of it and that you're constantly monitoring the effects of it, so that if that risk reward, balance changes, you give up, none of that is really present here. There's this sort of myopic focus on, you know, could we have saved a few more lives if we had been a little bit more draconian? And it's just very depressing to me that we're still in that, even after everything that's happened five years later.

[Professor Sunetra Gupta]

Absolutely. It is. Absolutely. It is a document that's monolithic in its content. It does not attempt to discriminate between different hypotheses. For example, just as I was saying, at the start of the epidemic, we didn't know whether lockdowns would work. So the patterns could have been explained by seasonality and herd immunity, or by behaviour change or by lockdowns. But if it is true that by July 19, 2021, we were about to conduct an experiment that would allow us to discriminate between these hypotheses, which is we lifted lockdown. And the modelers who had said that it was lockdown that was keeping numbers low, expected an explosion in numbers. Now that didn't happen. I think the least the inquiry could have done is just thought about that or brought that up and considered what that said about these different hypotheses. But going also back to your point, your very important point about what were we certain about and what should we have done given the risks of locking down? I believe that while people keep saying that, oh, this was just an application of the precautionary principle, that in fact it was an inversion of the precautionary principle. Because what were we certain about? The only thing we were certain about, which unfortunately now we also have a lot of evidence for, is that lockdowns would cause enormous harm. They cause harm at a socioeconomic level, not just within the country. We do have global responsibilities. I mean, 400 million people falling into food insecurity is not something we should just dismiss as happening over there. But of course, even within the UK, there was enormous socioeconomic harm and harm done to the poor and to the young. And of course, as you say, when you rip apart the fabric of society, which is such a corporate complex organism, there are all sorts of effects that you cannot even foresee. Having said that, we did know that harm would be caused by these non pharmaceutical interventions. What we were uncertain about, and remain so, as I said to be polite, was whether these interventions would actually have any effect on the spread of the epidemic, whether we could control it, and indeed what the purpose would be of controlling the spread. Given that one of the main ways that we achieve an accommodation with disease is through the spread of disease, leading to the buildup of immunity in the population. We did what we were least certain about and ignored what we were most certain about. And I don't see these discussions in.

[Freddie Sayers]

This document, specifically the claim that we should have locked down a week earlier, why would we have done that? So I can see, I guess, two scenarios in which that could have made sense. The first is if you were pretty confident that there were almost zero cases and that it was something that could be kept out of the country completely either until a vaccine arrived or possibly forever. You know, I guess you could see a lockdown working in that kind of scenario. Get the cases to disappear and then close the borders and be like New Zealand was for a time a kind of virus free zone. That option was Definitely not available to the United Kingdom. And to be fair to this report, even this report concludes that the so called elimination or zero Covid strategy was never available. So I can't see that that's relevant in the discussions of when they should have locked down, if we're taking that off the table. Because London is a transport hub. There were cases as early as January and many people think in the prior year, you know, New York and London had the worst very early because they were absolutely full of people with COVID long before there were discussions of lockdown. So then the other scenario would be, I suppose, if you were genuinely facing a scenario where hospitals were going to be overwhelmed and you could see that happening and you just had to slow it in order not to reach that moment of hospitals being overwhelmed. But that never happened. It didn't even come close. That was another complete fake and mistaken anxiety in the end because we built all these Nightingale hospitals that Matthew Hancock was so excited about, if you remember, whole auditoriums and stadiums given over to rows and rows of beds and they were never used, they were empty. I believe the final statistics were that of 10,000 beds, only 27 were ever occupied. So the whole second logic for doing a lockdown, the so called flatten the curve logic, which is to avoid the hospital system getting overwhelmed and just sort of go through the epidemic slower, that wasn't the problem. So I just cannot, I can't understand what the logic of locking down a week earlier would have been, can you?

[Professor Sunetra Gupta]

Absolutely not. And I think that's the issue. There was a sort of what I call a narrative collapse, particularly in the second lockdown. I mean, the first lockdown had a certain consistency of narrative with regard to trying to flatten the curve. Even though I think the data now suggests that you can't do that. And I mean it's important philosophically speaking to not take positions of being anti lockdown or pro lockdown, but to think, as you just have done, about what lockdown can achieve. And I always think you can think of three types of lockdowns. First of all, the very kind of the lockdown that you just mentioned, where you keep something out, you create a virus free zone and that is possible, as we've seen in New Zealand. It also comes at a cost, but it is possible. And indeed, I think if we had collaborated more internationally on this problem, we may even have said, well, why doesn't New Zealand, why don't remote islands just remain locked down for a period until we develop a vaccine and they can perhaps then contribute to the whole kind of effort to develop a vaccine by having the trials that, you know, we could have come up with a much more joined up international strategy on that point. And that would be based on the logical principle that you can, under certain very limited circumstances which are not available in the uk, keep the virus out. And then there's a second kind of lockdown, which is the noble lockdown, which people used to practice in times of plague, where you kind of stop a virus from leaving your village or wherever it is, which is very altruistic. And, you know, that's something that one could have thought about. And to an extent, I think the Bergamo lockdown was a sort of noble lockdown to an extent.

[Freddie Sayers]

I mean, I gotta say I don't support the idea of a noble lockdown. Devi Sridhar suggested that to me. She wanted to divide the country into cells that were cities and any cells that had any cases would be locked in to their cell. Presumably they would then all get Covid, but no one would ever leave. So if you lived in one part of Manchester, this was her brilliant idea that mysteriously didn't make it into her book. If you lived in a part of Manchester with three cases, you'd be unable to leave the city and then the cells of the country that were virus free would eventually kind of join up. I mean, that whole way of thinking is totalitarian.

[Professor Sunetra Gupta]

That's my third point, which is that actually once the virus gets in, to use lockdowns to stop the. I think is illogical, or at least now we do not have, and you put it perfectly, we don't have enough evidence to put in place those measures that might stop the spread, because those measures are very, very costly. The idea that you could use lockdown to slow the spread is, I think, fundamentally flawed or at least requires proper scrutiny and examination, scientific examination, not just this sort of a religious adherence to.

[Freddie Sayers]

I am prepared to say on the record, and I'm not sure what you would say to this, that I am anti lockdown at this point. I wasn't so in 2020 when I was trying to stay open minded and we had years of interviewing different experts from all points of view, but I feel like the evidence is now pretty conclusive. And if the government told me to lock down again, I would say no, basically. And I will guarantee that to our listeners that if they try another one, we will resist it, because I don't believe it is a prudent or sensible policy. And we now know what the horrible costs of it are. I mean, you can Sort of imagine certain scenarios maybe with a very deadly virus, you know, where children were vulnerable, that you might, you know, you could imagine some scenarios in the very extreme fringes. But if, if they try anything like this again, I'm going to be much less polite about it and I will go straight out onto the streets and just flatly refuse to lock down.

[Professor Sunetra Gupta]

Well, I'm very glad to hear that because let me be clear about this. We're talking about whether lockdowns work or not. But even if they do work, the whole reason I've got involved in this whole mess, as you say, or the rather unpleasant experience that I've had of voicing an opinion is really something I felt I had to do for just one reason alone, which is that lockdowns cause enormous harm. And this is something we could have anticipated. I mean it doesn't take lot of imagination to think of what will happen to a child who gets their only hot meal of the day or meal of the day at all at school to be told no, you can't go to school, leave alone. What happens when you just throw away, what is it, 300 billion, 400 billion. How much did we spend?

[Freddie Sayers]

They are the estimates between 300, 400 billion.

[Professor Sunetra Gupta]

Look at what's happening to our younger generation now. It cannot be worth it. And there was an alternative which is dismissed completely by the inquiry, which is that we could have enjoined people to reduce their risk if they were considered to be vulnerable. We knew right at the outset who was vulnerable to severe disease and death. And those people, we could have spent some of this money on protecting those people. Now I'm not saying this is a suggestion that we had and not saying that that too should have been up for debate. But you know, where is the debate?

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[Freddie Sayers]

But specifically the proposal you and your colleagues made at the time of the Great Barrington Declaration for so called focused protection, where basically people who were genuinely vulnerable for this could choose if they wanted to shield, not forced to shield, because if you're 85 and you would rather carry on living life and hanging out with your grandchildren, that must be your decision. But if you wanted to try and hide away from the virus until a vaccine arrived, it's fair enough to say, I think that there should be government support to help you to do that. But more than that, you know, it's a major political step to suddenly say that the role of the government is to mandate for everyone how they should choose to respond to an emerging health threat about which we don't know very much, and that the public space, the public square, needs to be kept safe and clean for everybody by top down government policies. It tilts you into a much more tyrannical and to my mind, dystopian world where you're not free and you can't make your own decisions and society basically ceases to exist. And so the political repercussions of that whole way of thinking are just worth resisting. And so if it happens again, I will try to muster the energy and fight back.

[Professor Sunetra Gupta]

Well, indeed, as I have said often there are three axes on which we need to think about this one is for which I recruit Aristotle's rhetorical triangle. There's the logos, the pathos, and the ethos. And the logos is what we've been mainly discussing. Do lockdowns work at all? And that is an important point to establish, because if you can defeat or address an idea at that level, then that's it. But if you can't, you have to think very carefully about the pathos, which for me is a stand in for the obvious socioeconomic consequences. But there's also the suffering. Indeed. But there's the ethos, which is how do we want to live our lives? What sort of understanding do we need to have between ourselves, which is part of, I think, a larger social contract, but how we want to live our lives. And what's really sad is during this period, that ethos, which is Actually, a highly communitarian concept was mislabeled as being individualistic. To be thinking about how do we want to live, how do we give hope to the younger generation. That I think is one of our primary responsibilities. And to take that away is not something we should be doing lightly.

[Freddie Sayers]

I think it's very interesting that of those experts and people in public life who were dissenting, there weren't very many. You were definitely one of them. Many of them were kind of cross disciplinary experts. I mean, you yourself, you're a zoologist, biologist, expert in epidemiology, you've also written novels, you're interested in the arts, you have quite a wide humanistic understanding of things. And it's also interesting, Jonathan Sumption, another person who took a very brave standing for someone in his position, he's also a historian, he's well versed in philosophy. He just is not myopic or narrow in what he judges to be important. And I wonder what you think about the idea that what happened during lockdown and during that process was to put at the top of our society, to put in charge of all of us very narrow minded and rather frankly undereducated science obsessives who wanted to solve for one single number, which was the rate of infection, the number of infections, and were prepared to sacrifice everything to reach that. And what's depressing about this report is that it's the same kind of narrowness. It seems to be continuing and that tendency is still there.

[Professor Sunetra Gupta]

Indeed. Well, I think this is part of a larger problem which is this idea that you have to commit to a particular profession, which in its worst form kind of absolves you of your responsibilities in other regards towards society. So you've seen people throughout saying, oh, I'm just a scientist. And this reminds me of the Klaus Mann play Mephisto, where an actor who has sort of colluded with the Nazis is accused of doing that and he puts his head in his hands and says, leave me alone, I'm just an actor and there is no such thing. You cannot be just an actor or just a theoretician or just an immunologist. We all exist within a framework, within the fabric of a society in which our goal is to live the best possible, the richest lives we can live and make sure that our children and younger, I mean the generations to come will be able to enjoy that. And I think it's not just that. It's also, I feel quite deeply that the absence of critical thinking that arises from just looking very narrowly at or not thinking widely about your social responsibilities lies at the heart of what we see. What I'm trying to say is actually that an interest in the arts is something that shapes your mind in different ways. And I think it's very important that our education is broader so that we develop the critical thinking abilities that will allow us in these eventualities to see more widely than the very simple problem or very specific problem in front of us.

[Freddie Sayers]

Sunetra, I think that's a great note to end on because we there have a top scientist pretty much telling scientists to stay in their lane and stop trying to take over the whole of society. They have an extremely important function and they need to do it in an open way. But there are other aspects and you know, rule by Professor John Edmonds for example, or Professor Neil Ferguson is not a very happy future. So we should make sure to avoid it. Thank you for joining us today.

[Professor Sunetra Gupta]

My pleasure as always.

[Freddie Sayers]

That was Professor Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford. She's a professor of theoretical epidemiology. She's one of the co authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. And if we have any hope at the end of this rather depressing experience of watching our nation come to what I consider to be completely the wrong conclusions from from this defining catastrophe, I think there's some hope in what Sunetra was saying that she has managed to maintain her humanity despite being traduced and attacked and dismissed. And she's focused on the things that really matter. And that to me is a great message to take out of all of this that they can implement policies, they can make mistakes and government will continue being its very imperfect thing. But the rest of us need to find ways to live outside it and make sure that they can't take from us what is most important. So thank you to her. Thanks to you for joining and we'll see you next week.

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[Sherrell Dorsey]

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