- Professor Sridhar was a proponent of ‘zero Covid’ but now admits she was wrong
The influential public health scientist who advised former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon that it was possible to eliminate Covid now admits she made ‘a mistake’.
Professor Devi Sridhar was an outspoken advocate of ‘zero Covid’, the controversial view that it was possible to eradicate the virus by taking draconian measures such as quarantining people when crossing the Scottish border.
The Covid Inquiry heard last week that Prof Sridhar regularly sent messages from the then Prime Minister on Twitter in which she appeared to urge the strategy to be adopted. In one, sent in June 2020, she told Sturgeon she had been working on a “feasible plan for the elimination (of the virus).”
Sturgeon would later describe elimination as the “only sensible strategy” to tackle the virus.
The revelation is likely to cause further controversy after the inquiry heard last week that Sturgeon also told Prof Sridhar not to ‘worry about protocol’.
LOOKING BACK: In 2020, Prof Sridhar blamed the Westminster government for not doing enough to stop the spread of Covid
The influential public health scientist who advised former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon that it was possible to eradicate Covid now admits she made ‘a mistake’
Prof Sridhar now claims she regrets using the phrase ‘zero Covid’ and that her aim was to limit infections in Scotland until the vaccine rollout.
“This was a mistake I made by using the word ‘elimination’,” she told the Covid Inquiry, adding that “maximum suppression” would have been a more appropriate phrase.
Other experts who spoke at the inquiry said the Scottish Government’s refusal to accept that Covid was ‘here to stay’ led to a much slower lifting of social restrictions than was necessary. During the pandemic, Scotland eased restrictions just weeks after England.
Professor Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh and a British scientific adviser during the pandemic, said Scottish ministers were concerned about appearing more cautious than their English counterparts. He added: ‘This transitioned into the idea that… somehow we could end up in zero Covid. To me… this was not consistent with the evidence.”
In June 2020, with Scotland recording fewer than five Covid cases each day, Prof Sridhar, originally from the US, published an article in The Guardian calling for a ‘zero-coronavirus Britain’. That same month, she told New Scientist magazine that ‘Scotland could eliminate coronavirus if it weren’t for England’, arguing that Westminster was not doing enough to stop the spread of the virus.
However, in January 2022 – 17 months later – Scotland recorded around 8,000 daily cases and Nicola Sturgeon announced the country would lift the majority of its Covid restrictions in a bid to live with the virus.
No country has managed to eradicate the virus.
Prof Sridhar now claims she regrets using the phrase ‘zero Covid’ and that her aim was to limit infections in Scotland until the vaccine rollout
Speaking on Tuesday, Prof Sridhar claimed she never believed a zero Covid epidemic could be achieved, instead likening it to ambitious public health campaigns aimed at ending malaria or tuberculosis. “We are using these campaigns to say that we will not accept the spread of these diseases,” she said. “(In the summer of 2020) we had the opportunity to hold and wait for a vaccine in an optimal position.”
However, experts accused her of ‘rewriting history’.
‘Prof. Sridhar now claims she never believed in Zero Covid, but all you have to do is go back and read her articles to see that this is not the case,” says Professor Robert Dingwall, a sociologist at Nottingham Trent University and former scientific advisor to the government.
‘She then argued that Covid could be eliminated if it weren’t for the bad English. Every scientist who knew what he was talking about said zero Covid was not achievable.”
Prof Sridhar declined to comment last night.