the times | Tuesday October 13 2020 1GT 5
bodyhealth&soul
JOHN ANGERSON FOR THE TIMESon a flu vaccine, and although at 55
she does not consider herself
vulnerable, she would take a
coronavirus vaccine if offered. She has
not downloaded the NHS Covid-
app because she does not think that
testing and tracking everyone is
“feasible”. She observes the rule of six
because she is no anarchist. In the
same spirit she wears a mask where
mandatory, although she thinks the
evidence of their efficacy is “equivocal”.
With this virus come few certainties,
she thinks, but her theory of its
progress in Britain seems to be this.
First, rather than arriving in March
and exploding, Covid more likely
reached us in January and began a
slower climb. In some parts it had
reached a peak by lockdown, the
middle of the first wave. Second,
society has more immunity than we
think. It comes not only from
antibodies (the estimate that just
10 per cent of us has them does not
take into account the capacity of
“immunological memory” to release
more), but from T-cells, which kill the
virus from within infected cells. In
addition, our existing immune
response to past coronaviruses, such
as those causing colds, are likely to
have cross-reacted to fight Covid-19.
“Our position is that we don’t know,
but there’s a lot of evidence suggesting
that immunity plays a role in bringing
down epidemics. We’ve seen that
happening around the world, and
we’ve also seen that the lifting of
lockdown in areas where the epidemic
had raged, like New York, London,
Stockholm, didn’t cause a huge rise
in cases.”
The levels are going up now, though.
“But cases will go up in the winter,”
Gupta says.
So they are rising because we’re
spending more time indoors, rather
than because the lockdown was eased?
“Well, the lockdown was eased some
months ago, wasn’t it? We didn’t get ill
and it wasn’t just because it was the
summer, because people did get ill in
Arizona and Mexico and places like
that where it’s pretty damn hot.”
How long would her strategy take
to work? “I’d like to think that by
Christmas [the death rate] would
be stable.”
Meaning? “We would have flu as
our benchmark. We’d say, ‘What’s
going on with flu?’ If it starts to edge
above flu then we start to think a bit
more carefully about what else we
can do, but up to that point shielding
the vulnerable as best we can is
probably overall going to cause fewer
deaths and less stress. That’s the
message really.”
It is one for which she has been
vilified. She has been written off as a
“theoretician”, although she has been
involved from the start in laboratory
studies of the disease and in clinical
trials. She has been accused of
peddling pseudo-science. Her political
persuasions have been assumed.
“I think it is just disgraceful that
people should think it is acceptable
to attack my motives, or — or to
assign motives. Actually, they can’t
find a motive. What would my motive
be? But ad hominem attacks are
really frightening.”
It is time to discuss, as we say, “the
optics” of the Great Barrington
Declaration, its name taken from the
small Massachusetts town where
Gupta and her fellow rebels met.
They were guests of the American
Institute for Economic Research
(AIER), a think tank promoting less
government and open markets. Need
I be worried about her politics?
“Personally, I am far to the left of
Keir Starmer. OK? And please do printSunetra Gupta
that. I believe in universal basic
income. I believe in nationalisation
of fundamental services. I am very,
very strongly in favour of government
intervention in public services and
in spending.”
Of the trio, Harvard’s Martin
Kulldorff is also “essentially a left-wing
person”. They have “some divergence
of political opinion perhaps” with the
third member, Stanford’s Jay
Bhattacharya. The AIER merely
sheltered them.
But she drank its champagne? “I
drink a lot of people’s champagne.”
They then flew to Washington to
meet President Trump’s Covid-adviser
Scott Atlas, who was criticised last
month by 78 of his former colleagues
at Stanford for his “falsehoods and
misrepresentations of science”.
“What we’re trying to say here is
that we have, we think, a solution to
this problem,” Gupta says. “We’re
going to have to collaborate.”
Gupta is a distinguished academic,
the winner of the 2009 Royal Society
Rosalind Franklin award for
outstanding women in science,
technology, engineering and
mathematics, and also a writer, whose
five novels, she says, are about the
“human condition, which is another
thing we’re completely neglecting”.
More than once in our conversation
she brings up the poor of India, the
country where she grew up, the
daughter of a university professor
and his teacher wife. She arrived in
Britain in 1987 via Princeton
University. In 1994 she married
Adrian Hill, a vaccinologist who is
now director of the University of
Oxford’s Jenner Institute. They have
two daughters, the younger of whom
completed her degree during
lockdown in their home.
This is not the first time Gupta has
made the news. In 2000 the chairman
of an appointment committee
scurrilously claimed that she had won
support for a readership post at
Oxford by having a relationship with
her head of department. It took eight
months for Roy Anderson to retract
and apologise for an allegation with
“no foundation in truth whatsoever”.
Anderson, who was found to have
intimidated the appointments
committee, resigned from Oxford and
from the Wellcome Trust. I wonder if
she knows that he is now a member of
the government’s advisory group Sage.
Shouldn’t his behaviour have
disqualified him?
“Well, without answering that
question, let me just say he behaved
incredibly badly,” Gupta says. “He
resigned from Oxford University for
a variety of reasons, one of which was
his defamation of me. I was very
fortunate I had so much support from
my colleagues and everything worked
out. It could have been a disaster. But
he was immediately appointed to
Imperial [College London]. He then
became the chief scientific adviser to
the Ministry of Defence. He was then
knighted. So Sage? It’s nothing.”
So why is she not on Sage herself,
providing at the very least a critique of
received Covid opinion?
“Why am I not on Sage?” She thinks
for a second. “I have in my life
generally avoided those sorts of
positions. I think I have learnt that I
am better able to contribute by doing
basic science. But this is an unusual
case where I think policy decisions are
causing 130 million people to starve to
death. I can’t just sit here and bury my
head in the science.”to stronger
arms
1
Try backstroke
Lynne Robinson, a Pilates
instructor and the author of
Shape Up with Pilates (Kyle
Books), says that this simple
beginner’s exercise will target the upper
arm, shoulder and chest muscles. Lie
on your back on the floor, knees bent
and feet flat and holding a weight in
each hand. “Start with a light weight
of no more than 0.5kg if you are new
to weights,” she says. Raise your arms
until straight vertically above your
chest with palms facing away from
your face. Simultaneously breathe out
and lower one arm forwards down by
your side and the other behind you,
back towards the floor, as you would
if you were swimming backstroke.
Breathe in and bring arms back to
the start position before repeating the
other way. Keep going until you can
no longer maintain good technique.2
Add the concentration curl
For a trial published in the
American Council on
Exercise journal ProSource,
scientists at the University
of Wisconsin-La Crosse tested the
effectiveness of biceps-strengthening
exercises by measuring muscle activity
via a wireless electromyographymachine. The concentration curl
beat seven others, including chin-ups
and a barbell curl.
To do the exercise, sit on a chair
with your legs apart while holding a
dumbbell in your left hand. Allow the
dumbbell to hang between your legs,
arm straight, then place the back of
your left upper arm against the inside
of your inner left thigh. Have your
palm facing forwards and curl the
weight towards the left shoulder.
Slowly return to the start position
without releasing the upper arm from
the inner thigh. Perform 12 repetitions
before changing sides. Aim to progress
to two or three sets.3
Use a rubber band for grip
Strengthening the muscles in
the forearm — the flexors,
which close the hand to make
a fist, and the extensors, that
help to open a fist to a flat hand — will
strengthen your grip. In many studies,
low handgrip strength has been
associated with fraility in older adults.
“A good way to improve grip strength
is to a weave an elastic band around
your fingers and practise opening and
closing your hands as many times as
you can until they are fatigued,” the
charted physiotherapist Sammy Margo
says. “Rest for 60 seconds and repeat.
Perform several times a day.”
Peta BeechineTheconcentrationcurl