Professor Devi Sridhar has been pretty vocal on the mainstream news channels over the last few days, insisting that the UK Government should rethink its policy on “kindly” deciding to not give anyone a criminal record for spending time with family over Christmas. But who even is she and what qualifies her to be scare mongering on Mainstream TV?
The Professor serves as a lecturer in Global Health Politics (the keyword here being ‘politics’) in the school of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, and has been an advisor to the Scottish Government throughout the so called Covid-19 pandemic. Interestingly she is also a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Health Industry.
So what medical qualifications does she have? The answer is…none.

Sridhar was a graduate student at the University of Oxford , where she was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. Her DPhil dissertation was on malnutrition in India. She then turned down a funded position at Harvard Law School to join the University of Oxford Global Economic Governance Programme in 2006, where she was awarded both MPhil and DPhil degrees.
So to summarise in layman’s terms she has a degree in Nutrition and a degree in Politics. Not really the kind of qualifications we’re looking for to be advising the Scottish government on a supposed pandemic let alone to be given a voice on mainstream news to cancel Christmas.
Sridhar has recently appraised the rigour of evidence on face masks despite the fact the actual scientific evidence says otherwise. Professor Carl Heneghan of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, (both an actual scientist and an actual doctor) warned that we were masking lack of evidence with politics and said there is currently an absence of Randomised Control Trial evidence in favour of mask wearing.
The Nutritionist and Political Expert also made a sharp u-turn on the re-opening of schools in Scotland. This was despite a consensus statement confirming the long term harms to children due to schools being closed from the Chief Medical Officers and Deputy Chief Medical Officers of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. The consensus statement was on the current evidence of risks and benefits to health from schools and childcare settings reopening.
This was the Nutritionist’s first tweet at 6pm.

And here’s her U-Turn tweet just 15 hours later at 9am.

In the last few days Sridhar has been appearing as a “medical expert” on “Covid-19” via the mainstream news channels and said that “mixing at Christmas is a terrible idea and that should be the message. I mean the other message should be we have vaccines being rolled out, the Pfizer vaccine is already being injected into people, Astrazeneca is on it’s way.” (We think you should take a look at both their records here and here.)
“So you could safely see elderly relatives in a few weeks and a few months, over Easter, so maybe delaying gatherings just by a few months. We’ve been in this for ten months so what another few weeks currently.” (Notice how she keeps switching from a few weeks to a few months here? Sound familiar?)
The Nutritionist also said that travelling between regions is not a good idea and this should be communicated to the general public. “I think actually the travel is the one thing they could re-look at and ask people to stay within their local authorities, stay within their tier and not try and move around over the next two weeks. We are going to pay for this at some point, it’s not like it can just happen and we won’t bear the consequences in January.”
So there we have it, a Political Nutrionist advising the Scottish Government on how to enforce it’s draconian, fascistic, dictatorial policies, and now a Mainstream News Expert who we will see on our screens for the next week calling for more draconian, fascistic, dictatorial policies and the cancelling of Christmas.
You couldn’t make it up.
Categories: Breaking News, Did You Know?, World News
[…] Newsround’s been putting YOUR questions to Professor Devi Sridhar, who is the Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, even though she is not qualified to do so and is instead just a qualified nutritionist. […]
[…] Newsround’s been putting YOUR questions to Professor Devi Sridhar, who is the Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, even though she is not qualified to do so and is instead just a qualified nutritionist. […]
[…] The qualified nutritionist stated that “there has not been one death to a child to the vaccine, there has been side effects but they’ve been treated.” […]