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

that the film was not produced by an agency, but he’d referred me to an agency for answers. According to the end credit the film was ‘recorded independently’ from the government, but the person at the agency knew I’d been in communication with the Cabinet Office. Hmm. I hadn’t mentioned that to him. If nothing else, this was a breadcrumb trail of communication between the video creators and the Cabinet Office. We might call it circumstantial evidence. And these breadcrumbs might lead us towards a heftier collaboration.

I understand the need to improve trust in vaccines in ethnic minority communities, but if this film has been created at arm’s length by the government through the filter of RICU, or an agency or a ‘community champion’, does that ultimately deal with the real issues and improve trust? Call me a crazy idealist, but surely the best way to improve trust in the government is for the government not to use covert propaganda? Richard Shotton concludes his book The Choice Factory by saying that ‘if a nudge doesn’t help the long-term health of your brand it is worth reconsidering using it.’ What is the government doing to its own brand by trying to manipulate us? There will always be whistleblowers even if they are anonymous. Eventually, the truth will out. As my contact said, he left the agency because the work was ‘fundamentally wrong’.

I was also worried about what the strength of the claims in the video might do to engender long-term trust in government, healthcare and vaccines. Here are some of the claims:

‘Soon we will be reunited with our friends and family provided we do one simple thing. Take the vaccine.’

‘How can you save someone’s life? Take the vaccine.’

‘There are no cases of significant side-effects among the millions of people who have received this vaccine.’

‘The vaccine does not include pork or any material of foetal or animal origin.’

There were several exhortations to ‘take the vaccine’ in order to be reunited with people. Emotional manipulation could be seen to interfere with someone’s ability to provide informed consent, which is an ethical bedrock of medicine. This type of messaging was literally promoted by the NHS in a document entitled Optimising Vaccination Roll Out – Dos and Don’ts for all messaging, documents and “communications” in the widest sense,9 published in December 2020. It advises healthcare workers on using messaging such as ‘normality can only return for you and others, with your vaccination’ and ‘this vaccine is effective in your age group and will allow you to return to normality, which means freedom to do what you enjoy, such as group classes, swimming, seeing friends and family, and getting your life back’. Behavioural psychology seems to have left reflective consideration about influencing informed consent in the pre-pandemic golden days of medical ethics. I talk more about this in Chapter 18, ‘Happy endings are not written in the language of coercive control’.

How can you save someone’s life by taking the vaccine? And which vaccine did the video mean? At the time the video came out, there were two vaccines being used in the UK, from Pfizer and AstraZeneca. 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 asked the NHS, Public Health England, the MHRA and the Department of Health and Social Care if this claim is accurate, but they didn’t reply. I have a feeling that if I had asked the various press offices about a video which was negative about vaccines they would have been much more responsive.

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’.

The MHRA’s Yellow Card reporting system provides data on adverse effects. When I contacted the MHRA for their comment about the claim made in the film, the press team responded: ‘The general safety profiles of the COVID-19 vaccines authorised in the UK are similar to other types of routinely used vaccines. As previously stated, the MHRA will publish details of all suspected reactions reported in association with available COVID-19 vaccines, along with our assessment of the data on a regular basis. We will inform you as soon as this has been published.’ This was opaque, but of course they cannot say ‘there are no significant side-effects among the millions of people who have received this vaccine therefore the claim in this video is wrong’, without risking the credibility of the video and disrupting trust in the vaccine. The first month of Yellow Card data11 for both vaccines showed there were some significant side-effects, even if they occurred in relatively small numbers, just as you would expect, including anaphylaxis, Bell’s palsy, and many more.

I would have felt more comfortable fact-checking all of these claims through the NHS, the government or the MHRA; I wish they had responded to me. Another of the claims that niggled at me was ‘the vaccine does not include pork or any material of foetal or animal origin.’ Well, again, which vaccine? And what does the video mean by ‘include’? 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