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Professor Sunetra Gupta at Oxford University in England stated in a recent interview that, as is usual in the winter season, rates of respiratory illness are increasing. Currently in the UK 1,000 people per week are dying of influenza and pneumonia. Simultaneously Covid deaths have risen to an average of 40 per week. (The Week in 60 Minutes, Episode 5 on Spectator TV).

Professor Gupta also talks about lockdown and the fact that this approach merely delays the course of the disease, whilst coming at profound societal cost. The most likely course is that we have to learn to live with this virus, as we have learned to do with all other viruses through history. The way we lived pre-Covid was a balance between quality of life and accepting the risks that come with that. Personally, I am still struggling with where all of that was swapped out for “Covid Safety” and what the motives were to make this a focus to override all else?

Professor Gupta also speaks intelligently about the need for herd immunity to protect the most vulnerable. She has been widely condemned for this despite the fact that herd immunity, pre-2020 at least (when it suddenly became offensive to speak of), is a protective feature of life in the case of many diseases. An example is Malaria, explained by biomathematician Gabriela M Gomes who has been studying immunity of SARS-CoV-2. Malaria transmits from an infected person to a susceptible person via the bite of a mosquito. It causes brain infections, severe anaemia and death. Or you can have no, to very few symptoms. Less severe cases of Malaria provide population protection against more severe forms by conferring a level of population immunity. In areas where Malaria is endemic, cases of severe Malaria are far less common when transmission is highest. Likewise is happening in the case of young and healthy people infected with Covid, who are at almost no risk of serious disease. In those places where transmission is high, deaths are reducing.

Swiss Policy Research (SPR), founded in 2016, is an independent, nonpartisan and nonprofit research group investigating geopolitical propaganda in Swiss and international media. SPR is composed of independent academics and receives no external funding other than reader donations. They recently published Covid: The Big Picture in 7 Charts which also provides some decent context. One striking example of the seven: