The Covid Lockdowns: Challenges, Dilemmas, and Trade-offs

Were lockdowns essential to protect public health — or a disaster for society, the economy, and individual freedom? Join us at the Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre, Worcester College, Oxford, for a thought-provoking seminar examining the trade-offs that defined Britain’s response to the biggest public health crisis in modern history.

Our interdisciplinary panel of experts will explore key questions:

• Could more lives have been saved through earlier and longer lockdowns?
• Might strategies such as the Great Barrington Declaration’s ‘focused protection’ have offered a safer balance between liberty and public health?
• What lessons can history teach us about balancing public health, personal freedom and societal impact?
• How should the UK respond to the next pandemic?

Expect a rigorous, engaging discussion spanning science, medicine, history, and economics — followed by a Q&A session giving you the chance to question the experts directly.

This event is hosted by the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF), a non-partisan organisation dedicated to safeguarding academic freedom in the UK. It forms part of CAF’s Open to Argument series, which promotes lively, good-faith discussion on the topics that are often hardest to discuss openly within Britain’s universities.

SPEAKERS

🔹 Sunetra Gupta is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford. She specialises in infectious-disease modelling and population-level dynamics, and has published widely on the spread and control of epidemics. She is also a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration.

🔹 Hugh Montgomery is Chair of Intensive Care Medicine at University College London (UCL). He has first-hand experience managing Covid-19 patients in intensive care and has contributed to major research on respiratory failure, critical-care outcomes, and pandemic preparedness.

🔹 Toby Green is a historian at King’s College London with expertise in African history, pandemics, and the social and economic impacts of disease. He is co-author of The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor — A Critique from the Left (2023).

🔹 Mark Honigsbaum is a medical historian and journalist specialising in pandemics, public health, and the history of medicine. He is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at City St George’s, University of London, and author of The Pandemic Century: A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19 (2019).

CHAIR

🔹 Güneş Taylor is a molecular biologist at the Francis Crick Institute, specialising in women’s health and fertility. She regularly discusses future technologies and sex differences with leading figures such as Richard Dawkins, Yuval Noah Harari, Simon Baron-Cohen, and Robert Winston.

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Host or Publisher Committee for Academic Freedom