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When I asked him what he thought of the use of fear to encourage compliance with the rules he replied that, ‘in a free society we ought not treat people as if they are things to be managed. We ought not to use behavioural psychology to lead people in this manner. What’s happening now is consistent with dystopian novels. If it is true that the state took the decision to terrify the public to get compliance with rules, that raises extremely serious questions about the type of society we want to become.’
If we’re being really honest, do I fear that government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes, of course it is. I went almost as far as saying that when I made a speech. Is this a totalitarian government? No. Do they believe they are liberals? Yes. And the pursuit of safety is our greatest danger at the moment.’ The pursuit of safety is our biggest danger, driven by fears and exaggerated fears.
As Silkie Carlo of Big Brother Watch said to me, ‘I have to pinch myself sometimes that doctors have been removed from YouTube for talking about their medical experience of treating patients.’ Not only does this not allow people to think for themselves, but the WHO itself has changed its thinking a few times during the epidemic – not unusual as scientists learn about a new disease. A banned video which contravenes today’s guidance might be compliant next week when scientific consensus changes.
Will we look back and say it was collective hysteria? There was a dancing plague in the 1500s. I think we are passing hysteria between us more effectively than a virus.
It’s already getting bad. These will have major impacts on the nature of the world around us.’
If you ultimately concede that lockdown is a useful tool, you must concede that the tool may be used again. The government, wielding the tool, develops muscle memory. So do we. Covid-19 is not the last novel virus. It’s not the last crisis. Would you accept another lockdown for a future epidemic? Could we do another lockdown without laying waste to our economy and society? Would you go along with another lockdown for a run on the banks, an act of terror, or a food shortage? How about regular lockdowns to reduce CO2 emissions? How about every winter to reduce deaths from flu? Would our fear be
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A SPI-B paper put forward the idea of elevating fear, so I assumed that they would have considered the exit plan. Fear impacts us mentally and physically and it would then impede the reopening of society – surely that would make an exit plan essential? They all seemed surprised to be asked. The idea was obviously not on the table yet.
Stott said to me that he couldn’t speculate because he was ‘far too busy in the here and now’. That is understandable. But if this was an experiment in a lab, researchers wanting to scare you would need a plan for how to manage your emotions afterwards. At the end of the experiment, they would probably show you a happy film and give you a slice of chocolate cake, at the very least. You would not leave the lab scared and unhappy. The psychologists running the experiment would have been through a very rigorous ethics process. We would have signed consent forms to agree to be frightened. I know I
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It is well known in advisory circles that scientific advice is inherently political.
She made an additional interesting point that video calls will be affecting group dynamics in ways we can’t fully understand yet. These behavioural insight ‘war room’ meetings are not happening in a room, they are happening in disparate studies and sitting rooms around the country – how does that affect communication and consensus?
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) in the US published a report in 2018 entitled The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science.
The NAS and the report’s authors are concerned with the use and abuse of statistics, irreproducibility of results and political groupthink in science, saying that the intersection between these issues is very much what is ‘wrong with modern science’.
‘There used to be rebels, and that was good, because you can learn from the rebels. Labour liked the rebels. During the coalition under Cameron, rebels became a little less popular. Then they disappeared.’ They think the teams of experts have been recruited for their unified approaches and in order to align with political intent. Once the panel is assembled, they ‘are given the injects as facts’. In the first instance in this epidemic it was that ‘500,000 would die’ and it was not their job to consider whether the facts were correct or not. Quite simply, questions are not welcomed. ‘You aren’t
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then she uncritically mentioned one of my personal bête noires, ‘don’t kill granny’, which was ‘good for compliance’. For one thing, some young people will have lost grandparents during the epidemic, making this quite an insensitive catchphrase. Back in March 2020, Neil Ferguson said that two-thirds of the people who would go on to die from Covid might die anyway during the year because ‘these are people at the end of their lives or have underlying conditions’.3 Given that, should children and young people be burdened with this level of responsibility in order to encourage compliance?
We need to make people want to have the vaccine, not feel like they must have it.’ Wouldn’t simply seeing the full data from trials and post-launch convince people? Wouldn’t longer-term safety data be part of that, because despite Fancourt’s assurances that safety stages have not been missed out, people will be aware that medium and longer-term side-effects won’t have emerged? And was she basically saying that propaganda is acceptable as long as it doesn’t look like it’s propaganda?
This seemed at the heart of the issue ethically – is it acceptable to implement a campaign of fear when the threat does not apply equally to everyone?
The government tried to democratise the risk of Covid, when in fact it was highly patterned and age-stratified.
‘This stems from the government’s concern that people wouldn’t follow lockdown rules. They went overboard with the scary message to get compliance. They were pushing at an open door, because there was already fear. Effectively, locking down schools was easy and unlocking was very difficult because of fear. The government’s campaign was too effective.’ I asked if a more honest and transparent communication of risk might not have reduced the difficulties with schools. He agreed,
Masks dehumanise people.’
But he told me that some of the group like masks because they convey a message of ‘solidarity’. In other words, there is a behavioural science ‘reason’ for wearing masks, to increase a sense of collectivism. This is a feeling favoured by the psychologists that is entirely unrelated to the scientific evidence regarding transmission. Essentially, they want us to feel like we are ‘in it together’.
SPI Two is the other member of SPI-B who could only speak to me honestly if I agreed to conceal their identity. They had grave concerns about the use of fear: ‘In March, the government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian. We have a totalitarian government in respect to propaganda.
SPI Two told me they felt we had lost the balance between protecting people from a virus and protecting what makes us human.
‘I’m stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology over the last five years.’ Anonymous scientific advisor deeply embedded in Whitehall
Similarly, our government has done very little to explain that risk from Covid-19 varies according to age and co-morbidity, and as we know there was an intention to increase our ‘perceived level of threat’.
Rather like the messaging on Covid, the AIDS advertising elevated fear but did not provide balance. People with HIV had to live with the disease, and still do, and the campaign did nothing to calm their fears. I
And does the government claim credit for its own campaigns rather than honestly attributing credit where it is due? Normal Fowler said of the AIDS campaign: ‘There was no time to think about whether it might offend one or two people. And history shows we were right – people took care and HIV cases went down.’6 What about the Terence Higgins Trust or other grassroots organisations? Might a different sort of campaign also have encouraged people to take care without scaring everyone witless?
A central tenet of this book is that the use of fear to create compliance is ethically dubious and, at the very least, warrants public debate.
Richard Shotton, author of The Choice Factory,
Patrick Fagan, author of Hooked
In David Halpern’s book, Inside the Nudge Unit, when he considers the ethics of this he says you don’t ask children if they want to learn to read and write, you just teach them to do it. I think it shows he thinks of the population as being like children.’
The behavioural psychologists advised that the sense of personal threat had to be ramped up at the end of March. The prime minister’s doomsday speech was scripted to do just that, by inducing fear and evoking war and authoritarianism. Chapter 1, ‘Fright night’, details this. From that point onwards, the risk of death was energetically amplified, particularly during the 6pm and 10pm news broadcasts and on newspaper front pages. The Downing Street briefings were characterised by authority figures in suits on raised podiums and yellow and black chevroned signage warning danger, danger, danger.
While the number of deaths in the UK to date is sobering, the British people have vastly over-estimated the risk to themselves from Covid-19,
Praising heroes is laudable, but what is determined to be heroism is key, and heroism consisted mainly of following the rules and following a nascent creed of safetyism and collectivism.
Patrick Fagan told me that in an analysis of the Rwandan genocide, one of the first linguistic predictors was the tendency to look backwards, to blame, and to focus on past wrongs and injustices, and he had noticed similar precursors in the language of blame during the Covid epidemic. This sounds extreme, but it’s important to at least be aware of these linguistic signposts – they have always led us down the ugliest roads in human history.
The term ‘social distancing’ is oxymoronic; distance is not social. In Australia, the advice was even more Orwellian: ‘Staying apart keeps us together’. The confusion aroused by this type of bamboozlement means you are more likely to be compliant to the command.
The Royal Society issued a report18 and press release urging the adoption of masks, although it concentrated on behavioural psychology and messaging rather than hard evidence. In fact, it had to note that uptake had been depressed by a lack of evidence-based medicine in favour of masks.
he believed there was evidence in favour of masks, but note that ‘signal’ comes before ‘evidence’. Behavioural scientists pushed for masks because they create a ‘signal’, when in fact not a single Randomised controlled trial can demonstrate the value of mask-wearing outside clinical settings.
Masked faces prime you to think of danger. We become walking billboards for disease and danger. They keep fear in our faces. Literally. They also distinguish the compliant from the rebels,
But although there was no new hard evidence, policies changed country by country.
In a speech on 3 August 2020 WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said ‘the mask has come to represent solidarity’. What he did not mention was any new evidence behind the policy change. In fact, the WHO’s guide, Mask use in the context of Covid-19,23 published on 1 December 2020, said, ‘At present there is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.’ The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) concurs that
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So mandating masks can feed the fear.’ He agreed that there was little ‘scientific basis’ for masks and that, in his view, they were designed to ‘make people compliant’. I asked about the ethics of that tactic and he retorted that ‘the ethics of it stink.
A recent large-scale randomised controlled trial in Denmark, Effectiveness of Adding a Mask Recommendation to Other Public Health Measures to Prevent SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Danish Mask Wearers,27 found no conclusive evidence that masks protect the wearer, although the study was not designed to test whether others could be protected.
And there is the acknowledgement – from a doctor – that a surgical mask (also known as a ‘spit-stopper’) does little to protect against viruses.
since the start of the the second wave alone, 25,000 patients had caught Covid while in hospital. That is a staggering number. It’s the equivalent of 50 hospitals worth of people.
government could keep new variant bait and switch policies going for as long as there are viruses. That’s forever, by the way.
This campaign didn’t just leverage fear, but also guilt and shame, pitting the sick against the ‘perpetrator’. ‘Othering’ the offensive disease-spreaders could create ill-will and conflict. And maybe it was no one’s fault. Maybe he got Covid while in hospital for a hernia operation. Maybe she caught Covid while working in a care home.
At the time of releasing this video it would not be possible to definitively prove that the vaccines interrupt transmission, which would help others. Therefore this was an unsubstantiated claim as well as emotionally manipulative. It was reported on 24 January that Israel had seen a 60% reduction in hospitalisations in over 60-year-olds,10 but firstly this was not proof of interruption of transmission, and secondly it could not have been factored into the video, which was released on 25 January.
I was surprised by the claim that there have been ‘no cases of significant side-effects’. There are always side-effects with vaccines and it’s essential to be honest about risks for ethical informed consent. For example, according to Pfizer’s patient information safety leaflet, the vaccine may cause ‘temporary one-sided facial drooping’ (Bell’s palsy) in up to one in 1,000, and ‘events of anaphylaxis have been reported’.
According to fact-checking website Fullfact, the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine was developed using cells which have been replicated from the kidney cells of an aborted foetus called HEK 293. Put simply, ‘While human-derived cells are used to manufacture the vaccine, they are filtered out of the final product.’12 So, the vaccine does not include foetal material, but was developed using it. Don’t people of faith deserve the complete truth for informed consent?
Faith groups don’t advise against the AstraZeneca vaccine, although it is a very controversial area and I suggest individuals should be fully informed in order to make up their own minds.
