Sunetra Gupta is the Einstein of virology – a mindboggling breakthrough that 99% of epidemiologists don’t understand

I’ve discussed this elsewhere. Here’s an email I sent to a senior academic in India:

Good Virology and immunology is as hard as good economics. Last year I had “blamed” the rich for transmitting the virus across the world. The fact is that the rich do us a great favour by bringing back all kinds of viruses from where they go (and spreading our viruses to other countries).

Donald Henderson was the Isaac Newton of epidemiology. He understood the basics, such as the index case problem. Without understanding the index case problem, one can’t understand how to manage pandemics. When even small pox can’t be stopped with quarantines how can respiratory viruses be stopped?

If Henderson was the Newton, Sunetra Gupta is the Einstein of epidemiology. She shows that keeping borders OPEN is the most sensible way for a nation to allow its citizens to acquire immunity.

Real science teases out truths that are obvious only in retrospect.

This 2019 article by Sunetra Gupta must be read by every policy maker: “Increased frequency of travel in the presence of cross-immunity may act to decrease the chance of a global pandemic”.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2018.0274

In one of her lectures (snippet and link at https://t.me/AusRepsOfficial/332) she said:

“We need to be on guard against these eventualities but possibly the best way to do so is to build up a global wall of immunity. And it may be that we’re unwittingly achieving this through our current patterns of international travel.

“Virulent pathogens cannot be the only things we bring back from countries where they’ve originated. It is more likely that we’re constantly importing less virulent forms which go undetected because they’re asymptomatic and these may well have the effect of attenuating the severity of infection with their more virulent cousins.

“After all the oldest trick up our sleeves is, as vaccination goes, is to use a milder species to protect against a more virulent species. Perhaps this is something we’re inadvertently achieving by mixing more widely with a variety of international pathogens.

“It is still of course entirely possible that we will be plunged into a dystopic state by the sudden emergence of an entirely novel pathogenic life-form or that an old foe may return in a completely new disguise. But our current pattern of long distance movements across the planet reinforces the possibility that we will already have some acquaintance with these new agents of disease.” [source]

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Shutting down Australia’s borders for the past 15 months is therefore equivalent to drastically reducing the natural immunity of the people of Australia.

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