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Tory billionaire bankrolled ‘herd immunity’ scientist who advised PM against lockdown

Exclusive: Johnson ruled out lockdown 24 hours after meeting with Sunetra Gupta – resulting in ‘1.3m extra COVID infections’

By Peter Geoghegan and James Cusick
Tory billionaire bankrolled ‘herd immunity’ scientist who advised PM against lockdown
Johnson effectively side-lined his official medical and scientific advisers to rule out a lockdown | Xinhua / Alamy Stock Photo
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A scientist who advised Boris Johnson against introducing a lockdown last autumn was bankrolled by a billionaire Tory donor, openDemocracy can reveal today.

Johnson’s apparent U-turn decision to not impose lockdown, which experts say may have resulted in an estimated 1.3 million extra COVID infections, came just 24 hours after meeting with Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta.

Today, openDemocracy can reveal that Gupta received almost £90,000 from the Georg and Emily von Opel Foundation to fund research “into the prevalence of COVID-19 in the population” in April last year.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0