Sunetra Gupta

Gupta is a professor of theoretical epidemiology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, where she leads a team of infectious disease epidemiologists. She has undertaken research on various infectious diseases,[2] including malaria, HIV, influenza, bacterial meningitis and COVID-19. She is a supernumerary fellow of Merton College, Oxford.[5] She also sits on the European Advisory Board of Princeton University Press.[6]

Gupta has been awarded the 2007 Scientific Medal by the Zoological Society of London[7] and the 2009 Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award.[8] In July 2013, Gupta's portrait was on display during the prestigious Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition along with leading female scientist such as Madame Curie.[9]

In May 2020 Gupta inaccurately declared: "I think that the epidemic has largely come and is on the way out in [the United Kingdom]".[10][11]

As of January 2021, two additional waves of the COVID-19 pandemic—larger in scale than the first Gupta refers to—had swept across the UK.

She has been a critic of the lockdown approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that the cost is too high for the poorest in society. Arguing herd immunity is a way of preventing vulnerable people from dying, her view is that countries should follow the approach initially attempted by the infectious disease epidemiologists in Sweden, shielding the vulnerable as best possible while those with minimal risk go about their lives and allow herd immunity to build up.[12]

A December 2020 research paper[13] subsequently highlighted the failure of Sweden's approach with data showing that "On Dec 20, 2020, COVID-19 deaths in Sweden had reached more than 8000 or 787 deaths per 1 million population, which is 4·5 to ten times higher than its neighbours". This sentiment was echoed by the Swedish King.[14]

She is one of the primary authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely-discredited paper[15] which advocated a focused response to the COVID-19 pandemic based on levels of individual risk.[16][17] The World Health Organization, as well as other numerous academic and public-health bodies, have stated that the strategy proposed by the Declaration is dangerous, unethical, and lacks a sound scientific basis.[18][19] The American Public Health Association and 13 other public-health groups in the United States warned in a joint open letter that the Great Barrington Declaration "is not a strategy, it is a political statement. It ignores sound public health expertise. It preys on a frustrated populace. Instead of selling false hope that will predictably backfire, we must focus on how to manage this pandemic in a safe, responsible, and equitable way." [15]

• Gupta, S.; Snow, R. W.; Donnelly, C. A.; Marsh, K.; Newbold, C. (1999). "Immunity to non-cerebral severe malaria is acquired after one or two infections". Nature Medicine. 5 (3): 340–343. doi:10.1038/6560. PMID 10086393. S2CID 21758199.
• Ferguson, N.; Anderson, R.; Gupta, S. (1999). "The effect of antibody-dependent enhancement on the transmission dynamics and persistence of multiple-strain pathogens". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 96 (2): 790–794. Bibcode:1999PNAS...96..790F. doi:10.1073/pnas.96.2.790. PMC 15215. PMID 9892712.
• Recker, M.; Nee, S.; Bull, P. C.; Kinyanjui, S.; Marsh, K.; Newbold, C.; Gupta, S. (2004). "Transient cross-reactive immune responses can orchestrate antigenic variation in malaria". Nature. 429 (6991): 555–558. Bibcode:2004Natur.429..555R. doi:10.1038/nature02486. PMID 15175751. S2CID 4403438.
• Gupta, Sunetra (9 August 2001). "Avoiding ambiguity" (PDF). Nature. 412 (6847): 589. doi:10.1038/35088152. PMID 11493898. S2CID 1528499.
• Recker, M.; Pybus, O. G.; Nee, S.; Gupta, S. (2007). "The generation of influenza outbreaks by a network of host immune responses against a limited set of antigenic types". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104 (18): 7711–7716. Bibcode:2007PNAS..104.7711R. doi:10.1073/pnas.0702154104. PMC 1855915. PMID 17460037.
• Buckee, C. O.; Jolley, K. A.; Recker, M.; Penman, B.; Kriz, P.; Gupta, S.; Maiden, M. C. J. (2008). "Role of selection in the emergence of lineages and the evolution of virulence in Neisseria meningitidis". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 105 (39): 15082–7. Bibcode:2008PNAS..10515082B. doi:10.1073/pnas.0712019105. PMC 2553036. PMID 18815379.
• Lourenco, José; Pinotti, Francesco; Thompson, Craig; Gupta, Sunetra (2020). "The impact of host resistance on cumulative mortality and the threshold of herd immunity for SARS-CoV-2". MedRxiv: 2020.07.15.20154294.

• Memories of Rain. Penguin Books India, New Delhi 1992, ISBN 978-0-14-016907-2.
• The Glassblower's Breath (1993)
• Moonlight into Marzipan (1995)
• A Sin of Colour (1999)
• So Good in Black (2009)