Devi Sridhar: “As soon as you’re in the public sphere, you get hit”

Photo: Gary Doak / Alamy Stock Photo

In November 2020, Devi Sridhar bought a lockdown tortoise. “I made the mistake of googling ‘tortoise sex’ to figure out whether it’s a girl or a boy,” she says. “I was like, I’m gonna have the police at my house soon.”

Sridhar, a professor of global public health at Edinburgh University, has needed the calming companionship of her pet. Amidst the turbulent months from Janury 2020-August 2021, she was thrust into the limelight by the Covid crisis. She became a fixture on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Channel 4 and BBC News, gaining both high-profile fans and critics, as…