Sunetra Gupta is an internationally regarded Oxford Infectious Disease Epidemiologist. She has studied how both flu and covid spread. She has been awarded the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London and the Rosalind Franklin Award of The Royal Society. In short, Professor Gupta knows what she is talking about. And yet when she and some colleagues wrote the Great Barrington Declaration in which they expressed cautious reservations about the lock-down policies that were being widely and somewhat uncritically adopted, she was rather viciously vilified by people who should have known better.
As Sunetra and her co-authors stated,
“The Declaration was written from a global public health and humanitarian perspective, with special concerns about how the current COVID-19 strategies are forcing our children, the working class and the poor to carry the heaviest burden.”
She and her colleagues voiced their concern when there was still time to listen. But no one did. Instead, vested interests and a small coterie of well-placed and arrogant scientists shouted them down and called them names. And even now, when what Sunetra and her colleagues warned has come to pass, and the vast cost of ill-considered policies has fallen upon the poor and our children - even now the self-righteous Guardians of correct thinking are unwilling to listen to anything or anyone who might challenge The Narrative.
I met Sunetra some years ago when Ard Louis and I interviewed her for our series “Why Are We Here?” Ian ‘met’ her when he edited that series.
One of the things I like about Sunetra is that though she is a practicing scientist and as such believes in the ability of science to approach the truth, she is also a published author who knows the persuasive power of narratives. And science, like any social institution has its share of normative narratives. The problem is that while scientist, just like everyone else, are prone to think their narrative is reality - particularly when power and prestige are involved - scientists are less likely than other people to admit they have a narrative. Scientists are quite often more blind to the narratives they live inside and mistake for reality, than many of us mere mortals. Science as a whole institution is afflicted, in my opinion, with a very severe and completely denied case of narrative blindness. And that is a danger to us all
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