A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic

by Laura Dodsworth

‘it is important to ensure that information communicated to the public be truthful, transparent and accurate. This is best communicated by experienced professionals. Risk should be disclosed in terms of both known risks, including common side-effects, and potentially unknown risk.’

Biderman’s Chart of Coercion,

people working in care homes could go in and out, but family couldn’t visit their loved ones. Social isolation can kill people, it’s a serious risk to be considered alongside infection with Covid.

See if you think Biderman’s Chart of Coercion can be applied to the government’s policies.

From the beginning of the epidemic, the government and media reported the daily death tolls with a macabre dedication and, as I have said before, without context, such as comparisons with deaths from other causes, or total deaths, or recovery figures.

Discussion of all impacted metrics is essential for people to make cost-benefit analyses. Yet Covid deaths were not balanced against unemployment, the lengthening NHS waiting list, missed cancer screenings, national debt, business closures, or calls to suicide helplines. As Paton told me, ‘There is a lack of critical thinking about parallels. We don’t say no one is allowed to drive a car to prevent all road traffic accidents.

1 People significantly over-estimated2 the spread and fatality rate of the disease. The British public thought 6–7% of people had died from coronavirus – around 100 times the actual death rate based on official figures. I tested this out on a neighbour and asked her what percentage of the British people had died. She said 10%. That would have been a very noticeable 6.6 million corpses.

Aside from the dismal coding, was it robust? Models based on assumptions in the absence of data can be over-speculative and open to over-interpretation. Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University issued a strong warning9 to disease modellers to recognise the severe deficiencies in reliable data about Covid-19, including assumptions about its transmission and its essentially unknown fatality rates. For instance, the model assumed no existing immunity to Covid. Since then, six studies have shown T-cell reactivity (which gives protection) from previous coronaviruses in 20% to 50% of people with no known exposure to Covid.10

In 2000 Ferguson predicted there would be up to 136,00011 cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the UK. In fact there were 178 over 20 years.12

A report entitled Use and abuse of mathematical models: an illustration from the 2001 foot and mouth disease epidemic in the United Kingdom13 strongly concluded that ‘the slaughter that took place was grossly excessive’ and that ‘the rift between the models and the practical reality of implementation may be so huge as to make the models irrelevant’. In 2005, Ferguson said that up to 200 million people could die worldwide from bird flu. They didn’t.

appreciate that these estimates aren’t an exact science but the difference between a prediction of 2,700 to the reality of 47 is embarrassing to say the least.’14

Some data has crumbled like icing sugar at the merest whiff of a challenge. Sadiq Khan quoted some quite astonishing figures: that someone not wearing a face covering had a 70% risk of transmitting the virus, but by wearing a mask the risk was reduced to 5%, dropping to 1.5% if both parties were wearing masks.16 The source was the British Medical Association (BMA). I contacted the BMA, which claimed that their Medical Academic Staff Committee and Public Health Medicine Committee had produced the calculations. Seven emails, two tweets and one phone call later, it turned out these figures had not been calculated by the BMA, but were ‘based on a presentation by Chinese infectious disease specialist Professor Wenhong Xhang in March’.17

The use of alarmist data is, well, alarmist, and the elision of detailed data is suspicious. Combined, this erodes trust in leaders and the media.

‘A cycle threshold above 35 generally involves people who are not infectious, yet NHS England documentation that has not been updated since January runs cycle thresholds to 45 that identify people who are not infectious.’

Plans should have been robust and flexible, but the NHS and Public Health England were ill-prepared in terms of surge capacity and PPE stocks.

‘Unprecedented’ is no excuse when pandemics are the basic bread and butter of disaster planning. Lucy Easthope, disaster planner, has a special interest in preemptive pandemic and recovery planning. She is the visible representation of the depth and detail of the UK’s disaster preparation and puts the lie to the so-called lack of planning. She said, ‘The media and the government have sold the idea that no one could have expected this, but a pandemic is the most likely national risk, and very well prepared for in the Home Office and the Cabinet.’

I was surprised by Easthope’s foreknowledge of non-Covid excess deaths and asked if it’s seen as inevitable: ‘The disruption that a pandemic causes means that people who would have died over the next five years will be brought forward. This has been made worse by a vigorous and long lockdown.’ So, should we have locked down? She was cautious, and said, ‘The virus is nasty and it must be respected. Some social changes would be essential, but otherwise I would advocate business as usual. The idea that essential civil function and hospitals would shut is incredible. In a pandemic you plan to keep as much open as possible.’

‘Lockdown was not the way to go,’ they said. ‘Bluntly, you should try and power through an epidemic. Lockdown was obviously going to tank the economy. We have never trained for a lockdown like this. You don’t do it for a coronavirus. I’ve been through all my papers. It’s just not something we do.’

Public execration has a silencing effect. When dissent is framed as mistaken, irresponsible and ‘dangerous’5 it creates serious personal, public and professional

I came across Professor Townsend on Twitter. Sadly, during the epidemic she decided to withdraw from the platform. ‘I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Twitter but during the dark days of 2020–21, I witnessed reprehensible behaviour by some academics,’ she told me. ‘People who I previously admired have behaved in dreadful ways and said absolutely vicious things about other academics that were completely unwarranted. Science, or at least scientific debate, has died in these times. I decided to leave the toxicity of Twitter and focus my energies on other ways of communicating that permit dialogue and nuance.’

Dr Knut Wittkowski, former Head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design at Rockefeller University, also experienced troubles online. He was fiercely critical of lockdown measures in an interview on YouTube in the spring of 2020, which garnered nearly 1.5 million views before being removed.

Censorship was evident across science, journalism and politics. Lucy Easthope is used to being seen as a ‘wild card’ in government advisory meetings. She told me the UK didn’t follow existing science and pandemic planning during the Covid epidemic. Lockdown went against previous protocol and there was ‘a cost to that’. Lockdown is ‘now ingrained deeply into our psyche. People made choices to not see loved ones, they made decisions they have to live with, it’s going to be very difficult to admit it was a mistake.’ I asked if she thinks people will be able to admit mistakes, or see there were other paths to follow? ‘They will fight us like weasels in a bag.’

The government imposed many restrictions on the population to control the spread of Covid and used fear, among other tactics, to encourage compliance. Yet one of the chief ways people caught Covid was in hospitals, which is beyond the responsibility of the population. A SAGE paper14 claimed that a staggering 40.5% of Covid infections in the first wave were caught in hospital. Between the beginning of the ‘second wave’ in September 2020 and 13 January 2021, over 25,000 people15 caught Covid while in hospital, but this may be an underestimate due to the limitations of the data available. The NHS was resolutely tight-lipped about hospital-acquired infections.

I felt discombobulated by the early strong convictions held by others about Covid and lockdown. It was as though everyone had gone on a Large Group Awareness Training Course for Covid and I’d missed the invite. I perceived a gap between rationality and reality. There were people who solely relied on the BBC and Number 10 press briefings, and then others who had ferreted around for alternative perspectives, such as the interview with Dr Knut Wittkowski which was removed from YouTube, or read one of Dr John Ioannidis’s articles. A broad range of media offered balance, allowed room for doubt and nuance and, in so doing, calmed the fear.

No-lockdown Sweden is an awkward counter-factual to locked-down UK. The country followed existing pandemic protocol and didn’t try the brand new lockdown experiment. The Swedes have largely been entrusted with government guidance rather than law and, as a result, life has carried on more normally and the economy saw a much milder downturn than the UK, with a 2.9% contraction in GDP,8 rather than the UK’s 11.3%.9 Lockdown fanatics think Sweden pursued a

think the nation has been bullied and gaslit. This was supposed to be about protecting us, but it hasn’t protected us. It’s disgraceful that the government tried to frighten us. This is a crime against the people. I can’t understand why the official bodies like the British Psychological Society aren’t talking about the ethics of what has happened. It’s like people are turning a blind eye to what’s happening.

What could persuade people to volunteer their liberty? Fear, in a word. Emergency situations called for emergency measures. The government responded swiftly and the emergency regulations were nodded through Parliament to applause rather than opposition. But were the UK’s emergency laws and regulations proportionate, the least intrusive available, strictly necessary and based on scientific evidence?

The government reviewed emergency legislation behind closed doors, leaving MPs and the public in the dark about the evidence for the emergency regulations and their proportionality. Repeated requests for a cost-benefit analysis to determine the proportionality were ignored until an attempt to quantify the impacts of lockdown and restrictions was finally published on 30 November, in the report Analysis of the health, economic and social effects of COVID-19 and the approach to tiering.1 ‘Vague’ might be a good descriptor for this report. It doesn’t even mention QALYs – quality-adjusted life years – which are the routine way that the government and NHS quantify the value of a life saved. Presumably this value was not included in the report because it would definitively show that the ‘cure’ has been worse than the disease. The lockdown

The strict lockdown laws meant that various basic liberties were curtailed, including: the right to protest, worship, maintain relationships, vote (elections were cancelled), the right to education was affected as many pupils had haphazard online provision for months, and you could not leave your house except for a non-exhaustive list of exemptions. These are not trifling privileges, but basic liberties.

London’s streets were eerily quiet when I visited barrister Kirsty Brimelow’s chambers in the summer. Echoing Sumption, she told me that what troubled her most about lockdown law had been the obfuscation between law and guidance by using the term ‘rules’, and the wrongful convictions that subsequently led to.

Silkie Carlo, Director of Big Brother Watch, put it to me plainly that we are living through ‘the greatest loss of liberty in modern Britain and it has happened by diktat. This is how autocracies and dictatorships emerge, for the “greater good”, measure by measure.’

Pointing temperature guns at our heads before we cross thresholds does not improve public health.

He said he’d received many messages from confused and worried people, some quite heartbreaking, such as a new mother who needed a doctor to examine her burst and infected episiotomy stitches. Astonishingly, she was not offered an appointment, but was asked to send a photograph of her genitals to an unsecured practice email address. This inconceivably insensitive and intrusive request is no substitute for

‘People think physical contact is not allowed,’ he said. ‘There are sad cases of people thinking that they must only wave through the window at family, grandparents think they can’t hug their grandchildren. But they are allowed. And imagine the barbarity of not being able to say goodbye to loved ones on their deathbed. This creates permanent scars.’

Barrister Francis Hoar wrote an article5 arguing that the emergency regulations were incompa...

asked him if he felt his public defence of civil liberties was a duty, or a mission. ‘No, it wasn’t a mission, that smacks of fanaticism. It was not my duty, it was the duty of politicians. The reason I have done it is that I thought this was an outrage which was deeply damaging to civil liberties. No politician was prepared to put their head above the parapet and say that this was disgraceful and profoundly damaging to our traditions and to the people who are least affected by the virus because they are young. Somebody had to say it.’

Francis Hoar said the country needed more lawyers to do their part: ‘The rule of law does not exist in isolation. It depends upon lawyers and judges prepared to defend it against government power: not just through their cases but through condemning the state for stripping individual liberty. It is our responsibility as lawyers to do so.’

The obvious argument in favour of fear is that the use of fear is acceptable if it works, if it kept us safe and if there is a net benefit for society. What did the government policies – lockdown, restrictions, a blitzkrieg of behavioural psychology – keep us safe from? Not unemployment, not other types of ill health, not death and certainly not fear. In fact, they couldn’t keep us safe from Covid-19 either. Lockdowns don’t work. Now these are strong words. You may splutter – ‘but, but, but!’ – and think my position is ludicrously counter-intuitive. But many international studies now offer the empirical evidence that lockdowns failed to contain the virus, and at the same time they are a blunt tool which causes great harms.

Working on CBRN threats (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons) taught me that weaponising fear to get the response you want causes you insurmountable problems in long-term recovery. Health risk communication is a science but most of that science has been ignored,

To think rationally we need to be less frightened. I put this to Baker and he concurred, saying that he believed people had suspended their ‘analytic powers because they are worried about dying’ and felt ‘powerless’. It is at this point more than ever he believes people need to ask the difficult questions.

The vaccine programme appears to be the Happy Ending to the Horrible Story of the Covid-19 pandemic. But I am cautious. Not because I am ‘anti-vax’, but because I have observed that this stage of the story is also being written in the language of emotional manipulation and coercive control.

The term ‘vaccine hesitancy’ is now used to describe the attitude of people who have decided not to get vaccinated. It implies a slight pathologisation, that those reluctant to have a vaccine may have some sort of mental condition, rather than be making an individual choice based on risk analysis and rational preferences. It is designed to denigrate the vaccine sceptic, to make them look a bit silly. It also implies the ‘hesitation’ is just a step towards the inevitable, part of the process – come on dear, we’ll get you over that hump and you’ll have your vaccination in the end. Surely an ad hominem attack is less ethical and robustly persuasive than evidence would be?

If behavioural psychology is here to stay then it’s clear that, at the very least, the different disciplines need greater synergy to ensure that reflective thought about ethics and informed consent is not a thing of the past.

have all parroted the same phrase: ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe’. Language is being coordinated – but by whom? The phrase is literally not true: if you have the vaccine, you have the protection it confers.

sociologist, author and fear expert Frank Furedi

Research has shown that smartphones, social media, and the internet more broadly tend to produce a shallower style of thinking – that is, more emotional, more impulsive, and more stereotyped.

And the government tore up the pandemic plans.’ Why didn’t the UK follow the existing evidence-based and rehearsed protocols?

Robert Dingwall told me that ‘the infrastructures for pandemic planning had been disbanded and the people involved had dispersed. The Department for Health was never supposed to have the role it has taken on. The Cabinet Office for Civil Emergencies Unit should have led across government.’ He explained that plans and documentation are simply not always handed over from one generation of civil servants to the next. Think of our pandemic preparedness as languishing in a forgotten filing cabinet.

Stefanie Grupp wrote in Political implications of a discourse of fear: the mass mediated discourse of fear in the aftermath of 9/11 that ‘fear is decreasingly experienced first-hand and increasingly experienced on a discursive and abstract level’. She also wrote that ‘there has been a general shift from a fearsome life towards a life with fearsome media’.

Big Tech companies wield enormous power in defining the acceptable framework for debate. Their censorship of credible scientists and news articles needs close scrutiny.