A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic - Laura Dodsworth (the first e reader .txt) 📗

to open was increasing. Honestly, it was a bit of a non-story. Even the sub-heading explained ‘Covid-19 triggers inflammatory response in very small minority of children, most of whom will not be seriously affected.’ In fact, at this time, more young people were being admitted to hospital with mental health problems than all medical conditions, let alone Covid.10

The anonymous scientific advisor said that there had been conversations about the use of fear. It was felt that the fear of death could be leveraged to make people follow the rules. While this source was party to confidential conversations, the idea that the government should weaponise our fear is fact: we know that the idea was officially put forward and minuted as part of the SPI-B recommendations.

Similar tactics were employed in other countries. In Canada, the Toronto Star11 reported that Ottawa’s behavioural science ‘nudge unit’ was mostly operating ‘under the radar’ producing campaigns to gain compliance with public health measures, helping politicians with their speeches and collecting data. The article accurately observed that a ‘massive social-science experiment that has taken place over the planet’ had ‘given government important clues on how to modify citizens’ behaviour for other big global issues – such as climate change, for instance’.

Jacinda Ardern made an embarrassing slip of the tongue when she referred to ‘a two-week period of sustained propaganda’ that New Zealanders who completed the government’s Managed Isolation were subjected to. Devastating truth, or inconsequential misuse of the word? As Stuff observed, ‘under this slip of the usually very polished tongue is a truth: the Ardern Government has, in fact, been delivering a masterclass in propaganda since Covid began. It has presented the plan that it formulated as the only feasible option, set up rules and language to prosecute that agenda and rhetorically crushed all opposition.’12

Gript13 reported that leaked docments showed that the Irish ‘Zero Covid’ advocacy group ISAG (Independent Scientific Advocacy Group) was instructed to ‘look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety, and uncertainty’, and to ‘go after people and not institutions’ because ‘people hurt faster than institutions’. ISAG members, many of whom are regular guests in Irish media, were told that they could count on ‘imagination’ to ‘dream up’ many more consequences’ as ‘the threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.’ Although ISAG is made up of independent scientists and doesn’t represent a government, these leaks reveal the tactics resorted to by the same type of academics who do populate government advisory panels.

The country with the most striking story was Germany. Leaked documents from the Ministry of the Interior showed that scientists were hired to produce a worst-case scenario in order to justify restrictions on society. Welt am Sonntag14 broke the story of how leading scientists from various research institutes and universities collaborated with management at the ministry to create a computational model to ‘get ahead of the situation mentally and in terms of planning’, which was to help plan further ‘measures of a preventive and repressive nature’. The State Secretary, Markus Kerber, drew a dystopian picture: it was about ‘maintaining internal security and the stability of public order in Germany’. Kerber wrote ‘without bureaucracy, maximum courage’ in his emails. For ‘without bureaucracy’ you could substitute ‘without honesty’ or ‘without scientific rigour’.

The scenario paper itself was more damning than the UK’s SPI-B paper, which was comparably freer of the dirty details. It said that to create the desired ‘shock effect’, the specific effects of an infection on human society must be made clear. Here are two of its astonishing suggestions:

‘Many seriously ill are taken to hospital by their relatives, but turned away, and die in agony at home gasping for breath. Choking or not getting enough air is a primal fear for everyone. The same applies to the situation in which there is nothing you can do to help loved ones who are in mortal danger. The images from Italy are disturbing.’

‘“Children are unlikely to suffer from the epidemic”: Wrong. Children are easily infected, even with exit restrictions, e.g. from the neighbours’ children. When they infect their parents and one of them dies in agony at home and they feel they are to blame for forgetting to wash their hands after playing, for example, it is the most terrible thing a child will ever experience.’

The German government, and the scientists it employed, collaborated to bring images of people choking to death at home, and to inflict fear and guilt on children, in order to make the population follow rules for an epidemic which had been deliberately exaggerated. This makes the concluding lines of the report even more unpalatable:

‘Only with social cohesion and a mutual distance from one another can this crisis not only be overcome with little damage, but also be future-oriented for a new relationship between society and the state.’

Would German citizens happily consent to such a ‘future-oriented’ relationship of manipulation and fear? Would the British public if the same type of leaks came to light? Science was politicised rather than independent, and the German government was most certainly not ‘following’ the science but rather dictating it. Might a similar scenario have happened in the UK?

In researching this book I found a number of people who were keen to talk to me because they were deeply concerned about government policy, but they had their own fears we had to work around: fear of losing their job or contract if they appeared critical of the government, or fear of being seen to be contrarian or an outlier and therefore being judged. Fear influences us in many ways and we are motivated psychologically by the need for social conformity. While it’s not as satisfying to quote anonymous sources, this is how it has to be, and they are our flies on the wall in the corridors of power.

A friend offered to connect me with a government official, someone who is in and out of Number 10; someone who was sick of what they saw every day at work. Like the scientific advisor I