‘Please don’t do a hit job’: An interview with Devi Sridhar

Of all the scientists who became household names during the pandemic, few divide opinion as much as Devi Sridhar. The Professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh turned adviser to the Scottish government and Guardian columnist is, according to your point of view, either a voice of reason who could have prevented the bungling at Westminster and steered Britain through the pandemic with a death toll as low as that of New Zealand, or a hectoring advocate of an impossible ‘Zero Covid’ strategy. She complains of having received hate mail – a baleful occupation hazard for many in public life, but perhaps all the more shocking if you were previously little known outside academia. Now she says she wants to step back from media work, writing: ‘If someone else can say what I’d say, I’d prefer they be the ones to say it.’

That is not entirely consistent, however, with publishing a book, Preventable: how a Pandemic Changed the World & How to Stop the Next One – along with undertaking the usual round of media interviews to publicise it.