Do we like Devi Sridhar?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent record, no harmful words found, and she has copped a lot of abuse for doing public service; the asterisk is the closeness to Sturgeon.
Devi Sridhar grew up in Miami, started out heading for medical school, then switched to public health. Her reasoning, as Prospect told it, was that medicine treats people who are already sick while public health tries to stop them getting sick. She ended up a professor of global public health at Edinburgh and a Rhodes Scholar.
Her profile blew up during the pandemic, when she became one of the faces advising Scotland's then first minister and wrote a regular Guardian column. She pushed for a Zero Covid approach early on. In 2022 she told the Spectator that once mass vaccination became the way out, she changed her mind, which is more than plenty of pundits manage.
Her stoush with the right-leaning press followed. The Spectator's Steerpike gleefully pointed to a Guardian column in January 2022 as proof she had flipped from lockdown hawk to sceptic. That reads more like a scientist updating her view as the evidence moved than a scandal, but where you land depends on whether you think the first call or the second was the wrong one.
The nearest thing to a real scandal came at the UK Covid inquiry in 2024. It heard Nicola Sturgeon had given Sridhar a private SNP email address for their 2020 contact, and Sridhar said she couldn't recall which address she used. Sturgeon's side said she forwarded the emails to the Scottish Government. Nothing in the reporting shows wrongdoing, but it fed the line from critics that she was too close to power.
On the harm check, nothing nasty turned up. We found no remarks about trans or gay people, no anti-vax or climate-denial material, and no dodgy company. She has criticised Donald Trump's handling of Covid and the leaders she groups with him, and her whole public career has been urging more caution on infectious disease. The record on LGBTQ+ issues is thin, though, so we say that plainly instead of dressing it up.
The good stuff is mostly the job itself: a public-health academic who stepped into a nasty spotlight to explain things to the public and paid for it. She told the inquiry she had done her tour of duty and wanted a quieter role. Her Edinburgh page lists a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award and two books on global health.