Problems with Sunetra Gupta's Assessment of the COVID Response and Next-Pandemic Solutions

The GBD author is right that Gain of Function can't give the world Scary Spreading Super-Viruses, but very wrong about 'pandemic' policy (and much else)

Great Barrington Declaration author and Oxford professor Sunetra Gupta expressed a surprisingly rational view on the biological ‘threat’ posed by Gain of Function (GoF) research at the recent Stanford University Pandemic Policy symposium. In essence, she said that GoF cannot result in a pathogen with the capacity to leak from a laboratory and subsequently wreak havoc on humankind. (I agree.)¹

Equally surprising, but far less rational, were the views Gupta expressed in a different session - Pandemic Policy from a Global Perspective - during which she spoke about the COVID response and proposed strategies for handling future pandemics.

Gupta’s Views on the COVID Pandemic Response

Gupta presented her perspective through a threat-response paradigm:²

• Identification of a threat. Assessing whether there is a threat at all and to what extent is it going to be represented accurately to the public (i.e., not minimizing or exaggerating the risks the threat presents).

• Determining the means by which to resist the threat. Asking whether anything can be done about the threat and deciding how the threat will be handled or resisted.

• Assessing and trying to anticipate the collateral damage or potential fallout of the means by which to resist the threat - the critical question being how collateral damage can be minimized.

Using this framework, Gupta called the 'COVID’ response “irrational” and “disastrous” and made the following points:

• COVID posed a threat but was exaggerated.³ “In the case of COVID,” she said, “there was a real threat” that was “manifest” in “all the data.” A virus was spreading globally and created mortality, but the threat was “confined to a particular sector of the population,” namely the elderly and those with certain co-morbidities and was “overplayed” by officials.

• It was determined something could be done about the spread of COVID and universal lockdown was applied to all. Gupta said the idea global spread of COVID could be stopped or reduced through lockdown-for-all was based on “slightly simplistic assumptions that were put into the mathematical models that projected what would happen” and then “propagated with a sort of fundamentalist zeal” and “dressed up as a communitarian position – or at least the only compassionate stand” when it was not.

• The collateral damage from the response was too high. “Lockdowns were put in place or put forward as a solution, without any evidence at the time that they would work to halt the spread of [the] virus,” Gupta said. “And it was known lockdown was going to cause great harms to all and would not stop spread.” The collateral damage wasn’t assessed correctly at all; the harms unevenly distributed to low and middle income countries, children and the poor were disregarded in the name of protecting the interests of affluent adults in higher-income countries.

Gupta’s ‘Next Pandemic’ Solutions

Gupta also described things that weren’t done (or weren’t done correctly) in the COVID pandemic that should be done better or differently in future pandemics.⁴

1. Voluntary or Mandated ‘Individual Risk Reduction’ (née ‘Focused Protection’)

Gupta acknowledged NPIs “don’t necessarily scale up to the community” but insisted “we do know that we can protect the individual” from a threat like COVID. Her primary strategy for doing this is a “one-size-fits-all solution” she now calls individual risk reduction instead of focused protection, the term from the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD).

Essentially, this involves keeping “the vulnerable” away from as many people as possible, for as long as possible, until the risk subsides (e.g., a vaccine is developed, new treatments are formulated, existing treatments are successfully applied):

“It stands to reason that if you stay at home, if you don't contact enough, you know, too many people, you can reduce your own risk. So, knowing that, the sensible thing to do is to try and protect those who are vulnerable using those methods.”

Her assumption is that people catch a pathogen or illness through contact or proximity to other people. Gupta reinforced the contagion aspect by citing “tricky situations” such as “people in care homes” and “multigenerational families” and went on to say,

“In wars we evacuate vulnerable children. I mean, we can think of ways in which we can make sure that the care workers and care homes isolate themselves for a period of time. Go into the care home, work there, and then leave. You know, have this sort of cycling.”

Ideally, Gupta said, such approaches would be state - or internationally-supported and could involve mandating the vulnerable to quarantine as part of a ‘social contract’, including in circumstances where the health system is threatened, with concerns about fundamental liberties subsidiary to the system:

“Whether it is voluntary or mandated is not something that actually particularly concerns me. I think as long as a mandate is actually part of a social contract, I don't think one needs to shrink from that word in the way the people do…It could be either voluntary or State-supported individual risk reduction. Or if you think, ‘The health system’s about to collapse we've got to do something,’ then maybe you mandate it for a while. These are issues we must consider without getting tangled or just, you know, polarized just by virtue of whatever our own proclivities are concerning Liberties or intrusions into personal spaces.”

2. Two-Week Lockdown

For Gupta the difference between lockdown, focused protection, and individual risk reduction is one of scale and degree, with lockdown (or universal lockdown) being a measure imposed on everyone by mandate, and focused protection/individual risk reduction being only ‘the vulnerable’ and either required or self-sanctioned:

“Focused protection was a subset of locking down, so it's kind of ludicrous people who were advocating lockdowns to say, “Oh but you can't protect people,” because if you stay at home and have your groceries delivered you are reducing your individual risk.”

She said ‘lockdown’ is an acceptable pandemic-response strategy, under certain circumstances:

“Focused protection, paradoxically, actually also may be a part of some kind of lockdown strategy in that you could say, ‘Okay, let's lock down for two weeks because that's the only way and the most efficient way of achieving focused protection for a short period of time.’”

Focused protection works, she said, but with ‘COVID’ failed in certain places who couldn’t do it well, or as she envisioned:

“...one of the things about focused protection that I used to stumble on is, ‘Oh, how do you do that in India or how do you do that in a country that doesn't have the means to do it well?’ The country may not have the means to do it, but internationally if we gave them the aid, they might - I'm not saying it's certain - be able to implement it.”

3. Selective, Internationally Agreed-Upon Border Closures Accompanied by Vaccine Trials

Gupta proposed that “remote communities” could be protected by border closures but would only be possible if countries came to “a kind of accord around it,” motivated by the idea that such communities could be used for conducting trials and experiments:

“To me, if we had an International Community, if we operated under truly internationalist principles, we could have had a kind of understanding where we said, ‘Okay, well you're a remote community. Why don't you keep your borders closed for a period of time while we try and make a vaccine that would protect the vulnerable? Maybe we could do the trials in your country.’”

4. More Randomized-Control Trials on NPIs.

In addition to vaccine trials in closed communities, Gupta wants responses to the Next Pandemic to involve more randomized-control trials on NPIs. She said there is still “great uncertainty” about whether about non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) can stop or reduce the spread of a virus. However, besides quarantine/isolation and border closures, Gupta did not say which NPIs she thought warranted further study due to lack of certainty about efficacy.

Commentary

Sunetra Gupta is correct that ‘COVID’ was exaggerated as a threat and the response disproportionate to the threat, with incredible harms and collateral damage to children and the poor. She is incorrect - alarmingly so - in her characterization of COVID as a threat, assessment of the ‘response’, and Next-Pandemic solutions.⁵

COVID was never shown to be a threat.

There was never any evidence that SARS-CoV-2 (whatever that is) and the disease it is said to cause (COVID-19) presented any threat to any age group or health condition.⁶ Early estimates for the infection fatality ratio derived from ‘outbreaks’ in China and the Diamond Princess fiasco were calculated independent of iatrogenic measures and without normal risk of death in mind. Even those who said the ‘new’ disease was ‘like a flu,’ were not clear with themselves or the public about whether it displaced risks presented by influenza or added to those risks.⁷

Between her two panel sessions at the Stanford conference, Gupta did not fully confront, let alone sufficiently answer, basic questions about what threat(s) a new spreading coronavirus posed, how the threat was determined, when it began, and why it required various emergency declarations. She also failed to mention that the appearance of a ‘spreading’ viral threat and insistence that ‘the vulnerable’ need to be protected from the threat is made possible by testing. If Gupta has reservations or critiques about the validity, reliability, or use of such testing, she did not articulate those views as a panelist.

There’s no such thing as minimal harm and predictable collateral damage involving disruption of complex systems.

It’s true the COVID response was disproportionately harmful in certain countries and to children and the poor but in this Gupta doesn’t go far enough: Nothing about ‘the response’ to ‘COVID’ was beneficial to humanity. Zero.⁸

Overall her view suffers from myopia regarding how complex, interdependent systems work. On one hand, she seems to grasp that harm is inevitable when people ‘do something’ which interrupts the normal functions of healthcare, social services, education, etc. On the other hand, her idea of generating and pushing the least harmful interventions is non-sensical because it is impossible to account for all harms, as many will be second- and third-order.

During the session, Gupta said, “it’s possible to come up with solutions that are going to cause the least overall harm globally.” The notion that any agency or collection of authorities & experts could somehow conjure a list of strategies that are the least harmful globally - as though we have God-like capacity for viewing the world and the people therein in a manner that can account for harms to billions of people - is hubristic, at best.

Most NPIs are harmful or unethical, especially when required or coerced, and even if they did ‘work.’

After a trillion COVID-Era studies, the suggestion that we somehow lack knowledge about whether NPIs would keep people from testing positive for a virus or from getting actually-sick with respiratory illness is laughable. The harms & inefficacies of the NPIs Gupta wants to study further were widespread and well-known before, during, and after being implemented.

Gupta and her Oxford colleagues estimated in March 2020 that 50% of the UK population had already been infected with SARS-CoV-2. Is her ideal RCT scenario one that involves implementing focused protection “earlier” in a disease-spread event, i.e., locking down or isolated people sooner and harder to see if that would somehow stop transmission between individuals or circulation she believes occurs? She assumes staying away from people reduces risk of testing positive for or becoming sick with something but really she has no idea if that’s the case. Indeed, a challenge study for SARS-CoV-2 and a lack of evidence involving the ‘first’ person-to-person transmission in the U.S. suggest otherwise.⁹

If Gupta is concerned about either the ethics or secondary effects of telling (letting alone requiring) ‘the vulnerable’ to reduce human interaction and contact, she did not express those concerns during the panel. Granted, her time was limited, but listeners do not get the sense from what she said and how she said it that Gupta grasps the trade-offs and harms of isolation. Has she been watching any of the testimony from the Scottish COVID-19 Inquiry? Is she aware of harms being exacted against nursing home residents in Alberta, Canada? Has she read the pleading letter in JAMA from June 2020 that describes how minimizing contact with human beings ‘works’ in practice?

It is truly incredible that after witnessing the COVID Event, Sunetra Gupta unabashedly supports and is not “particularly” concerned about the idea of internationally- and state-supported mandates that would lock up people deemed vulnerable to a disease until the purported risk of the disease is reduced by a vaccine or other treatment. The ‘social contract’ she speaks of in the event of an impending ‘health system collapse’ sounds very much like the pretext for the Human Rights Heist of March 2020 and is entirely dismissive of (what she calls) ‘virtue or whatever our own proclivities are concerning Liberties or intrusions into personal spaces’ as though these are afterthoughts or secondary to the properly-conducted RCTs and vaccine trials she’d like to see next time.

Offering a Worst-Case Scenario to justify “lockdown” or “focused protection” is precisely what was done in 2020 - with disastrous results

Perhaps most shocking is Gupta’s explicit endorsement of a two-week temporary lockdown, i.e., “when the only way and the most efficient way of achieving focused protection for a short period of time.”¹⁰ That sounds hauntingly and disconcertingly familiar.

When and why Gupta believes this would be appropriate and in accordance with her vision of acceptable trade-offs that minimize collateral damage globally for children, the poor, or anyone else is not clear. What is fairly obvious from Gupta’s idealization of individual risk reduction/focused protection is that she wants it to work - and to give countries money to make it work - principles and abrogations of liberty be darned.

Sealing off and using remote communities as vaccine laboratories is wrong.

One further gets the sense that Gupta envisions the Next Pandemic as the Perfect Research Playground when she’s musing about keeping people from leaving their locale in the name of a vaccine trial.

She doesn’t give examples of the “remote communities” she’s imagining but it’s hard to not think of places and populations in Africa that have been exploited for similar purposes — not to mention the billions of people who were used in the COVID mRNA shot experiment. Gupta considers “a kind of accord” involving “the International Community” a workaround for the pesky problem of the people who actually live in such places objecting to being cordoned off and used as guinea pigs. Everything about this notion reeks of Medical Colonialism or worse. Gupta is heavily involved with the development of a universal flu shot - and been for over a decade - so her visions should not be taken as hyperbolic or merely hypothetical.

Summary

Until and unless compelled to confront her assumptions about the threat of COVID, the existence of pandemics, and the implications of her inclination to '“protect” vulnerable people via isolation/preparation for trials and experimentation, there is no place for someone with a social-globalist mentality like Sunetra Gupta’s to exert influence over public policy or those in public policy positions.

Finally, as stated elsewhere, I agree with Sunetra Gupta’s position that GoF research can’t give the world pathogens that “leak” and create mass illness and death but strongly disagree with her support of the GoF enterprise, which is aimed at producing vaccines of dubious efficacy and necessity, like the universal flu shot she’s pursuing and wants to foist on the world.

Between comments in two sessions at the Stanford conference, Sunetra Gupta made very clear that her ultimate solution for alleged viral-pandemic threats will always be injections.

1. Claim of Function - it wasn't a lab-leak and neither was it from the wet-market | Sunetra Gupta's View on the Origins of SARS-CoV-2 and the 'Threat' Posed by Gain-of-Function Research

2. This is my distillation the framework she employed, extrapolated from her language.

3. In this session, Gupta said “COVID” whereas in the Origins session she said SARS-CoV-2.

4. Although Gupta rejects the lab leak and wet market scenarios as implausible - and gain of function research relatively harmless from a ‘threat’ standpoint - she also believes pandemics arise inevitably and cyclically from nature..and will continue to do so.

5. I distinguish a Next Pandemic view from a No Pandemic view: https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/next-pandemicno-pandemic

6. See also COVID-19 Did Not Come from a Lab

7. Most people who say this still aren’t clear about their assertion.

8. Which is not to say there weren’t individuals, private/public entities, and enterprises that didn’t benefit or profit. There were (e.g., pharma, politicians, the WHO, Bill Gates, bioterrorism/pandemic preparedness industries…)

9. Even an academic virologist with whom I corresponded - cited in this article - was compelled to make an inferential leap about the transmissibility. Likewise, as Daniel Goytas documents in his book Can You Catch a Cold? numerous experiments have failed to make one person sick with flu or cold via proximity or fluids from an actually-sick person. At minimum, less is ‘known’ about how or why people became ill with respiratory symptoms than Gupta pretends.

10. ‘Lockdown’ is not a provision in U.S. communicable disease codes. I can’t speak to laws in the UK (where Gupta lives).