Gautam Menon is Dean (Research) and Professor of Physics and Biology at Ashoka University, Sonepat. He is also the Director of its Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability and a Commissioner for the Lancet Commission on Epidemiological Modelling. He serves on the scientific review committees of several international and national agencies, including the Human Frontier Science Program and the Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance. He has written extensively for the general public on topics at the interface of science and society, has appeared many times on TV and has been quoted across multiple other media, both nationally and internationally, during the COVID-19 pandemic. A short video clip featuring his COVID-19 recommendations, made for the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, has been viewed close to a million times. In 2022, Apolitical named him in its list of 100 most influential academics in government worldwide. Email: gautam.menon.mail [at] gmail.com
by Gautam I. Menon Across the period of a week, starting around the 8th of August 2023, I transformed from being someone in reasonable, if not perfect, health, to being a patient confined to a hospital bed, effectively paralysed waist-down. That I knew that my condition could possibly deteriorate even further, to the point where…