For advice on pandemics should we consult an Edinburgh team of 12 led by a professor of ‘global public health’ or one long-retired expert on contaminated church lunches in Wishaw?

Professors Sridhar and Pennington

Imagine you’re a researcher for BBC Scotland and you’ve been asked to find someone to speak on pandemic control. You find Professor Devi Sridhar of Edinburgh University’s 12-strong Global Health Governance Programme:

http://globalhealthgovernance.org/team-1

Eight of the team do research into infectious diseases for, amongst others, the World Bank and the World Health Organisation.

Professor Sridhar led the team whose recommendations have prevented another Ebola outbreak:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)00946-0/fulltext

You take your suggestion to a meeting with the editor. Lisa Summers and Glen Campbell might have been there.

They agree that what you’ve found is ‘all very interesting’ but they’re going to go with retired prof Hugh Pennington again, who investigated a bacterial outbreak after a church lunch in Wishaw, last century. They always use him. He’s value for money with his vampiric looks and comments to scare the viewers.

The editor adds that she is a bit young and a woman so maybe doesn’t have the gravitas we need to counter whatever the First Minister says?

You toss the file in the bin and go back to finding relatives of coronavirus victims who look like they might cry if you keep the camera on them long enough and don’t say anything.

8 thoughts on “For advice on pandemics should we consult an Edinburgh team of 12 led by a professor of ‘global public health’ or one long-retired expert on contaminated church lunches in Wishaw?”

  1. “Oi aim ze Count Vlad Badpennyngton-Turnup, and Oi vant your bluid. Not ze vishy-vashy bluid of a Brit Nat, but ze strong bluid of the Scots”. “To make me young again, so Oi can fly, like ze bat in ze sky”!

    With apologies to all the vampires out there.

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  2. She’s young is from the USA great CV. Pennington is old , English born CBE. One fits the Anglo centric nature of Britain the other doesn’t.

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  4. Devi Sridhar is brilliant and she isn’t scared to share it.

    The most shocking thing of this whole scandal and my struggle to understand it was watching that clip of a NHS meeting from 2017

    from the Telegraph article
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/28/exercise-cygnus-uncovered-pandemic-warnings-buried-government/

    One of the major filters in Manufacturing Consent is working not just in the media but appears to concentrate the higher up the ladder in all our institutions and the pandemic is exposing many of them. Conformity.
    Every time i read the news Covid-19 news i see the words of yet another idiot gov spokesperson and Jasson Leitch is one of them. Then tune into alternative news and you hear the likes of Devi Sridhar.
    Phew sanity.

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    1. Hear her talk-up Scotland.

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