Devi Sridhar

"expert"  Devi Sridhar    (academic)
Born	1984 Miami, Florida, USA
Nationality	Indian, American
Alma mater	University of Miami, University of Oxford
Member of	DELVE, Rhodes Scholar/2003, WEF/Young Global Leaders/2021
Interests	• Ebola • Zero COVID
In 2020, Devi Sridhar advised the Scottish government on how to deal with COVID in Scotland. Extremely jab-happy when it comes to children.

Devi Lalita Sridhar is a professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. Her research considers the effectiveness of public health interventions and how to improve developmental assistance for health. A WEF/Young Global Leader, she advocates on British corporate media for harsh restrictions and a "Zero COVID" strategy.

She has been giving medical advice to Nicola Sturgeon. She was extremely jab-happy when it comes to children, and claimed that "the vaccines are 100% safe and effective for children" in a video made for CBBC which the BBC later rolled back.

Her expertise has been questioned. She blamed excess deaths in Summer 2022 on climate change.

In 2023, she was claiming ULEZ, 15-minute cities and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods "save lives".

Early life and education

Devi Sridhar was born and raised in Miami, Florida in an Indian family. After graduating from Ransom Everglades School at the age of sixteen, she enrolled in a six-year program at the University of Miami that awards a bachelor's degree in two years, after which students are in the school of medicine. Having received her bachelor's degree in biology at the age of eighteen, Sridhar became the youngest person in the US to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. She says she was inspired by her grandmother, who raised her children in the 1960s before completing her DPhil and writing several books. Sridhar used her Rhodes Scholarship for graduate study at the University of Oxford. Her dissertation considered malnutrition in India. She 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.

Career and research

From 2008 Devi Sridhar was a postdoctoral fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Her first book, The Battle Against Hunger, was selected by Foreign Affairs as a must read book in aid policy. The book investigated the World Bank funded nutrition programme based in India, which became a blueprint for aid programmes despite lack of evidence for its effectiveness. Sridhar was concerned that the programme did not address the social conditions that cause undernutrition in India.

In 2011 Devi Sridhar was appointed to Wolfson College (Oxford), as an associate professor in global health politics. She serves on the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Health Industry. She started to research the rise of public–private partnerships in global health governance, and how, whilst they are crucial to combat infectious disease, their non-transparent accountability and effectiveness should be investigated. International organisations are redirected by specific incentives, and the asymmetry of information sharing between member states and groups like the World Health Organization or World Bank limits their impact. She worked with Chelsea Clinton and used principal agent theory to study the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the GAVI Alliance. She worked with Julio Frenk on the need for an independent and impartial World Health Organization.

Devi Sridhar investigated the international response to the West African Ebola virus epidemic, and what reforms were needed to heal a global system for outbreak response. She partnered with the Harvard Global Health Institute and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to independently analyse the global response. She established ten essential reforms to prevent and respond to the next pandemic. In 2014, at the age of thirty, Sridhar was promoted to full Professor and Chair at the University of Edinburgh and became the founding Director of the Global Health Governance Programme. She works between Edinburgh Medical School and the Blavatnik School of Government. Sridhar compiled the first Wellcome Trust Open Research Collection on the topic of Global Public Health. She is concerned by the rise of chronic disease, drug-resistant infection and funding for primary healthcare.

She regularly contributes to the BBC World Service, CNN, Channel 4 News, and BBC Radio 4. She is a member of Iyiola Solanke's Black Professors Forum.

Coronavirus adviser

In 2020, Devi Sridhar advised the Scottish government on how to deal with the COVID-19/Pandemic in Scotland. She was a relentless zero COVID advocate. She said that people should never go on a cruise ship, calling them "floating germ factories".

She was part of WEF/Young Global Leaders 2021. She promoted vaccine passports and mask mandates, as well as a Christmas lockdown in Winter 2021. She praised Scotland for locking down and criticised England for not.

In June 2022, she wrote a scaremongering article in The Guardian titled "Don’t be complacent, another Covid wave is coming. Here’s how we can manage it".

She has a book coming out in 2023 on preventing the "next pandemic".

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Senior spy appointed to lead UK’s joint biosecurity centre	Article	5 June 2020	Helen Warrell Sarah Neville	Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at Edinburgh University, says: “The virus is not worried that you’re tracking its progress, it’s not going to change its tactic. Cybersecurity is not your worry with a virus. It’s a biological phenomenon.”
Stop the Worsening Undercount of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza	Article	5 March 2024	Ralph Nader	From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.

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References

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 15 August 2020.
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