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Tory billionaire bankrolled ‘herd immunity’ scientist who advised PM against lockdown
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Tegnell, who has been accused of pursuing a herd immunity approach in Sweden, has declined to say what was discussed at the Number 10 briefing.

openDemocracy asked the Cabinet Office for details of correspondence between Tegnell and the Prime Minister. Michael Gove’s department confirmed some of this information was held, but declined to reveal it because “it would weaken ministers’ ability to discuss controversial and sensitive topics free from public scrutiny.”

Gupta told openDemocracy there was “no conflict of interest” in her work on COVID – which serially criticises what she calls the “hammer and dance” approach of lockdowns and travel bans – being funded by the von Opel’s personal foundation.

The Oxford professor was also among the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated naturally acquired ‘herd immunity’ as a solution to the pandemic. The strategy was described by the head of the World Health Organization as “scientifically and ethically problematic”.

A leading public health expert has called into question Gupta’s COVID research.

Professor Martin McKee, former president of the European Public Health Association, told openDemocracy that one of Gupta’s recent research papers – about Sweden’s pandemic response – was “an attempt to muddy the waters” that “reads like a denialist text, with many features of that genre”.

Tory donors

Georg von Opel, the Swiss-based great-grandson of the German car manufacturer, and his wife Emily were key Tory funders during David Cameron’s time as prime minister. The couple – who last donated to the Conservatives in 2016 – were given personal access to Cameron and enjoyed private dinners with the then prime minister and his family.

The Georg and Emily von Opel Foundation was formed in 2005. The foundation, which is chaired by Georg with his wife as one of only two trustees, largely concentrates on helping communities in developing countries through improvements in child development and education, combating hunger and malnutrition, and projects to improve access to water and sanitation.

But in April 2020 the von Opel Foundation made “an unrestricted gift” of £88,332 to Oxford University “to support Professor Gupta’s research into the prevalence of COVID-19 in the population”.

Later that month, Gupta wrote to Georg von Opel to tell him that she had appeared on a Channel 4 debate titled “Can science beat the virus?”

“I tried to make the point even more strongly that we cannot just consider the question of lifting lockdown in the single dimension of what it will do to the pandemic but they have cut it down dramatically,” Gupta wrote in an email obtained by openDemocracy under Freedom of Information legislation.

The funding of Gupta’s COVID research was described by a leading NGO executive, whose organisation has benefitted from von Opel cash, as “a departure that suggests a political objective rather than an overtly humanitarian one”.

openDemocracy contacted the foundation asking why it had funded Gupta’s research. No reply was received.

Swedish model

Gupta’s forecasts on the state of the pandemic have often been criticised. In September, the same month she met with Boris Johnson, she said that the daily infection of 50,000 was “likely to be wrong”. It wasn’t.

Her research has, however, often been cited by members of the influential Covid Recovery Group (CRG) of backbench Conservative MPs pushing Johnson to lift lockdown measures.

Last May, Tory MP Steve Baker approvingly tweeted a news story in The Daily Telegraph quoting Gupta’s comments that the coronavirus epidemic was “on the way out” and urging pubs and restaurants to be allowed to re-open.

Baker, who at the Covid Recovery Group has employed many of the same approaches that he used while chairman of the pro-Brexit European Research Group, cited Gupta’s involvement when calling on his Twitter followers to sign up to the Great Barrington Declaration.

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/tory-billionaire-bankrolled-herd-immunity-scientist-who-advised-pm-against-lockdown/