Professor Paul Hunter, a public health expert at the University of East Anglia, has published more than 300 papers and worked on every major epidemiological outbreak of the last 30 years.
Prime Minister hopeful Rishi Sunak last week tried to take credit for blocking a Christmas lockdown over Covid, claiming he returned from an overseas trip to convince the government.
But the real silent heroes were a handful of brave Covid scientists who publicly challenged the consensus at the time: that Omicron could cause thousands of deaths every day without the most miserable restrictions.
As the wider scientific community began to call for new measures to stop the highly infectious new variant, which we now know is mild, Professor Paul Hunter saw no reason to push the panic button.
Relying on his 40 years of experience thwarting pandemic threats across the planet, the no-nonsense grandfather insisted the time had come for Boris Johnson’s government to change tack.
He, like his colleagues, had seen Omicron run through South Africa a few weeks earlier, where it caused a record number of cases but, crucially, did not overwhelm hospitals or kill on a large scale.
Unlike his contemporaries, however, Professor Hunter concluded that Britons did not need to go home and hide from the new strain now that we had vaccines on our side.
South Africa was not locked down and was still thought to be more vulnerable than the UK, with only a fraction of the population double-vaccinated and an even smaller number given booster doses.
But Professor Hunter’s reward?
Relentless trolling and offensive insults from lockdown zealots, who are still publicly lobbying for the return of the extortionate free lateral flow scheme and face coverings.
At the same time, the 66-year-old Covid centrist has also come under a torrent of abuse from hard-left scientists for apparently “avenging real fear” during the pandemic’s darkest days.
Professor Hunter has faced relentless trolling and offensive insults from lockdown fanatics, who are still publicly lobbying for the return of the extortionate free lateral flow scheme, outdoor mixing and face coverings.
Professor Hunter, from the University of East Anglia, told MailOnline: ‘I’ve received hate mail from Covid skeptics and trolling from people suffering from the Covid Zero hoax.
“I think I must be doing something right.”
At the height of the crisis, Professor Hunter, an avid traveler and photographer, was the expert on infectious diseases.
Professor Hunter’s Pandemic Predictions
Professor Paul Hunter, a public health expert at the University of East Anglia, has consistently said what would come with Covid before it happened, adapting his views as the state of Britain’s response changed over the last two years
July 2021: Euro 2020 immunity
Just ahead of Britain’s first ‘Freedom Day’ in July 2021, SAGE released a series of models predicting up to 200,000 cases a day in the following month.
It caused the outcry that the Government had moved early to ease the measures.
But in fact, cases remained below 40,000 until November, when the Omicron variant began to appear, with high levels of immunity keeping infections at bay throughout the summer.
At the time, Professor Hunter said the country was probably enjoying “Euro 2020 immunity”, with so many unvaccinated youngsters catching the virus in pubs and beer halls during the tournament.
This gave them an unexpected immunity that would keep infections stable throughout the summer, he said, as it proved to be the case.
August 2021: Don’t delay the senior push
In late August that year, Professor Hunter called on the government to distribute third doses to the over-80s as quickly as possible, in time for their immunity to kick in over the winter.
He said he saw no reason why the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) had taken so long to sign off on the third doses for these groups.
Professor Hunter argued that her immunity was waning rapidly from the second doses taken as early as January, and boosters would be crucial before winter.
Boosters later became a key part of Britain’s strategy during the winter after Omicron became dominant and was implemented on all adults.
December 2021: Plan B won’t stop Omicron spread, but vaccines will help manage impact
After cases had started to pick up at the end of the year, Professor Hunter claimed that the Plan B restrictions put in place by Boris Johnson would do little to stop Omicron.
Ultimately, the variant would lead to an unprecedented number of daily cases, peaking at more than 230,000 on January 4.
But he insisted Britain would be able to handle the caseload because of the strength of the reinforcement deployment.
Speaking on December 8, he told MailOnline: ‘I’m quite pessimistic that we could control the spread of omicron at present.
“But I’m hopeful that because we have high vaccine coverage and high pre-infection and because we’re deploying the booster dose better than pretty much anywhere else, we can at least manage the impact of the Omicron surge “.
December 2021: Remove the 10-day isolation rule
By late December, the Omicron wave was reaching its peak and causing massive disruption with people being forced into isolation while infected.
Professor Hunter said staffing pressures in vital sectors such as health and firefighting could be eased by relaxing the 10-day rule.
He said most people were more contagious by the fifth day and Britain should adopt a test-and-release system to ease the crisis.
No10 would do it at the end of the month.
February 2022: Don’t panic with Deltacron
After the wave subsided, fears were raised in February about a variant of Covid that was a hybrid between Omicron and Delta.
“Deltacron” was detected in Britain and health officials said they did not know how infectious or serious it would become.
But Professor Hunter told MailOnline that it “shouldn’t pose too much of a threat” because the UK had huge levels of immunity against the original Delta and Omicron strains.
The variant never took off, with BA.2, a branch of Omicron, the cause of the wave of infections in late March.
His opinion was so highly regarded that on his busiest day he received calls from a dozen newspaper reporters on his busiest day, gave ten radio interviews and made four television appearances.
As one of the leading voices in his field, Professor Hunter has published more than 300 papers on everything from Ebola to bird flu since he began his academic career in the 1980s.
He consistently named how the pandemic was going to play out, allaying fears about new variants that could never become dominant, such as the Brazilian strain P.1 and “Deltacron.”
And last summer, he was one of the first to pressure No10 to start handing out third doses to the elderly, months before the move became Government policy due to pressures caused by the Omicron strain.
Professor Hunter also gained notoriety for being one of the few scientists to consistently refute calls to plunge Britain back into lockdown last Christmas.
Wild predictions by the government’s scientific advisers suggested that up to 6,000 people would die from the virus every day during the winter. They actually peaked at 273 on January 21, just a fraction of the levels seen during previous waves.
Although Mr Johnson’s government resorted to Plan B ahead of the big day, bringing back the use of masks in public places, vaccination passports at major events and guidance on working from home, he defied calls to go beyond.
MPs praised experts such as himself and Dr Raghib Ali, an epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge who was asked to brief cabinet ministers in private ahead of a two-hour meeting chaired by the prime minister, for pressing the government not to implement another lockdown. .
It was the same argument that forced former chancellor and Tory leadership hopeful Sunak to rush back from his trip from the Treasury to California to Downing Street.
As part of his pitch to beat Liz Truss and take the reigns of the Tory party, he claimed the UK was “hours away from a press conference” to announce new measures.
But despite being vocal over last Christmas, Professor Hunter has not always opposed tough restrictions.
The virus control measures were necessary in the first year or so to save thousands of lives and prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed by “crushing the sombrero”, as described in March 2020.
When Covid was still considered an obscure virus that would probably only affect the Far East like the original SARS, Professor Hunter was already interested.
At the time, he himself was a zero-Covid advocate, believing the virus could be almost entirely eradicated “if managed properly,” as was the case with SARS, which originated in China in 2002 but faded from naturally after infecting 8,000 people worldwide.
China isolated cases in hospitals as soon as they tested positive, halting the spread of the Covid-like virus.
But by March 2020, when the first cases of Covid began to appear in Britain, taking a similar position had already become “unsustainable”, Professor Hunter explained.
He told MailOnline: ‘The peak of SARS infections came seven to ten days after infection.
“At this point, people would have been diagnosed and properly isolated to stop the spread of the disease.
“In March, it became clear that infection with Covid could arrive before symptoms appeared. This meant you could be walking around spreading the virus before you knew you had it.
“Anyone who proposed zero Covid at the time really didn’t understand infectious diseases.”
With seemingly “unavoidable” cases, the question turned to how best to manage them.
Professor Hunter publicly supported blockades and other non-pharmaceutical interventions, as referred to in the medical community, as…