Sunetra Gupta is an Indian-born British infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. She has performed research on the transmission dynamics of various infectious diseases, including malaria, influenza and COVID-19, and has received the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London and the Rosalind Franklin Award of the Royal Society. She is a member of the scientific advisory board of Collateral Global, an organisation which examines the global impact of COVID-19 restrictions.

The Great Barrington Declaration was an open letter published in October 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns. It claimed harmful COVID-19 lockdowns could be avoided via the fringe notion of "focused protection", by which those most at risk of dying from an infection could purportedly be kept safe while society otherwise took no steps to prevent infection. The envisaged result was herd immunity within three months, as SARS-CoV-2 swept through the population.